


What A Big Heart You Have

by LullabyKnell



Series: Lullabyknell vs. Naruto [9]
Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon-Typical Violence, Chance Meetings, Character Death Fix, Coping, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Families of Choice, Fix-It, Fluff and Angst, Friendship, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Happy Ending, Hatake Sakumo Lives, Hopeful Ending, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Loss, Male-Female Friendship, Mental Health Issues, Platonic Female/Male Relationships, Pre-Canon, Recovery, Suicidal Thoughts, Third Shinobi War, Unreliable Narrator, Unresolved Issues, Wordcount: 10.000-30.000
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-26
Updated: 2017-11-02
Packaged: 2018-09-12 10:54:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 22,754
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9068524
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LullabyKnell/pseuds/LullabyKnell
Summary: In which a little red fox saves the big white wolf. In which Hatake Sakumo lives.





	1. An End A Long Time Coming

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Pyrothebookworm](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pyrothebookworm/gifts).



> Somebody *deep breath* _dropped shit_ in my inbox again. People, you _cannot_ do this *deeper breath* because I am easily manipulated and there's a horrifyingly high chance whatever plot bunny thrown at me will take me the heck out and claw into my face. I want you all to picture the rabbit scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, because *deepest breath* that's what's happens. 
> 
> I did not know that I had so many feelings about Hatake Sakumo, but apparently I actually have a lot of headcanons and opinions on Hatake Sakumo that have been very patiently waiting to be poked with a stick and let loose. And I also, as it turns out, have a lot of feelings about Uzumaki Kushina. I have not written nearly enough Kushina, I think, so it's about damn time I turned my spotlight onto her. At this point, I'm beginning to think I just have a lot of feelings about horrible character deaths happening to people who did not deserve the ends they got. 
> 
> Anyway, the overall tone of this fic is fluffy angst and emotional hurt/comfort, but this beginning bit is just angst with a SERIOUS warning for suicidal thoughts and mental illness. I don't have anything graphic here and the entire point of this fic is people getting better, but I just want to remind people that the problem with mental illness is that it doesn't give you a healthy or objective or logical perspective on yourself, your life, and life in general. It mostly just sucks.
> 
> P.S. I'm not super familiar with the Third Shinobi War or some of these characters and their lives, so... I just made a lot of stuff up either to suit the story or because I thought it was neat. I actually usually headcanon, for example, that Uzushio was destroyed in the Second Shinobi War, but here I have it being destroyed at the very start of the Third for story purposes. And so on.

 The thing is that these thoughts weren’t sudden. That’s what’s really getting him right now, that after so many, _many_ years and so _much_ effort… after so much life and love and happiness… these intrusive, awful whispers are back yet again and louder than ever and they’re _winning._

 The thing is that Hatake Sakumo has been suicidal for a long time.

 It’s not unusual, apparently, and he doesn’t know if that makes it better or worse – probably better, if it means other people survive this. He doesn’t know where it started exactly, which he thinks definitely makes it worse instead of better. Sometimes, in the darker moments, when he’s stagnating and incapable of seeing anything else, he wonders (wrongly, he knows it has to be wrongly, but… _what if…_ the whispers say) if he’s just always been this way and he should just give up and accept it.

 He remembers a time before these thoughts, though. He remembers a time before his heart existed in pieces barely held together and his own head wasn’t trying to kill him. He used to have _pack,_ he knows. There was Mother and Father, Aunties and Uncles, Cousins and Elders, and Brother, he remembers. There was a Hatake Clan – people, pack, _family._

 Things were good, then. Things were simple and light, once.

  _Happiness,_ he used to have it. He  _knows_ he did. 

 Mother died on a mission. She died buying time for the mission to succeed, according to what little details the stone-faced jounin stranger gave as they offered their solemn thanks and apology. She did her duty.

 Father died on a mission too. He was a bodyguard and took a poisoned blade meant for the Senju princess, the late Shodaime’s daughter, who told them that she admired his loyalty and wished she could have brought his body back with him in it. He did his duty. (That Senju princess is dead now anyway, though.)

 The Aunties, Father’s elder sister and first cousin who might as well have been a sister, died protecting the village from released prisoners of war. Konoha's very own unfortunate enough to be captured and made into biological weapons, ticking time-bombs of biological warfare, and then released to wreak havoc by a rogue Iwa clan. It was a hard choice, the Sandaime Hokage said when he honored their sacrifice, killing Konoha’s own like that before dying themselves, but the village came first. The many before the few. They did their duty.

 The Uncles died on missions too. One fell with the Nidaime, a long, long time ago, when Sakumo was barely old enough to sit still for the entire village’s broken-hearted mourning. One fell defending the Daimyo, a long time ago, when he called for Konoha’s protection in the time that the war was stirring. The last fell fighting off several Kiri Swordsmen, a time ago, in an attack on Uzushio’s coasts, and his dead body washed up ashore days later. They did their duty.

 The Cousins died similarly, only one or two making it home to slip out of medics’ saving.

 Only the Elders died of old age or sickness and most of them were long since gone.

 One of the cousins, however, said that their beloved Granny really died of a heart that broke when her wife and daughter died. A broken heart was a sickness too, Cousin said bitterly, and wolves were prone most to it, born to pine for the moon as they did. Elders passed on their duty, then passed away, of broken hearts as the last to remain.

 The Hatake Clan was never large and always loyal to those they considered their own. Sakumo has always loved his clan, for their deep love of home and family especially, and then one day, he had to look up, freshly returned from his brother’s funeral and belated commendation ceremony, to realize that there was no one else left.

 Sakumo doesn’t know when he started equating duty with death.

  _Lone wolves die,_ the whispers say. _A pack of one is soon done._ He doesn’t know when they started and he knows that they’re wrong, but his heart has been broken too many times and the strings holding him together are so thin. The whispers are so loud and surely there must be something to them if they’ve gone on for so long? They’ve got a point, haven’t they? _Lone wolves die, that’s what they do._

 The thing is that he was getting better, though. When his commander took him in and said to a broken teenager: _You’ve got heart and skill, kid, and we need those things._ When Maito Dai took one look at that broken teenager and said:  _We’re going to be good friends, you and me, I can tell._ When a sharp young lady bumped into a fragile young man and said:  _Yo, I’m Ayame, what’s up?_

 The thing is that Hatake Sakumo has known that he’s depressed and potentially suicidal for a long time.

 It’s not unusual, apparently, among veterans and shinobi without stable support groups. The war definitely made it worse for an emotionally wrecked young wolf without a pack, but his commander was watching for it and did her best to make it better. He thought other people finding out would make it worse, but Dai figured it out and that made things better, so Sakumo told Ayame and that made things better too. They helped. He didn’t have to accept living that way, he learned, it wasn’t always this way and it wasn’t always going to be this way.

 He remembers times without the whispers. He remembers that there are ways to fight the whispers, but they’re all so hard to remember right now when the whispers are so loud. He remembers a time before when he managed to collect a _pack_ again and they had it figured out, even with the war raging around them. He had help, he had _pack,_ and they helped him find the ways and strength to fight the whispers, then looked after him when he couldn’t fight the whispers on his own. He remembers _getting better._ He remembers _winning._

 It’s hard to remember much of anything right now.

 Commander is dead. She didn’t survive the war. It was war, after all. It’s sad, but it happens.

 Ayame is dead too. She died not long after Kakashi’s second birthday, suffering from a sickness that sapped her bright life away. She wanted a family so badly, but she didn’t get to enjoy it for very long. It’s sad, but it happens.

 Dai is the only one left, but he’s gone too. They didn’t even get to see each other when Sakumo returned from his massive failure, as Dai had already been sent out to the eastern coasts on an emergency mission, responding not nearly immediately enough to sudden and disastrous attacks from Kiri against Uzushio. Dai's son had already been left with his late mother’s family, the Mori Clan. No time for failing friends as yet another war raised its ugly head. It’s sad, but it happens.

 Sakumo doesn’t know what to do with himself now.

 He failed his mission - and in failing his duty, has failed his village. He has failed his village so very terribly, so unspeakably terribly, and now he’s doomed his son to being raised in yet another war. He brought _war_ down on them and that is inexcusable, because the White Fang should have known better and should have _done_ better no matter what he thought he knew. Sakumo has shamed himself, shamed his son, shamed his clan, and _shamed_ the legacy and sacrifices of his family with his selfishness and foolishness and arrogance. He did not do his duty as he should have. He has failed not just as a shinobi of Konoha and head of his clan, but as a Hatake with any honor at all. 

 He just... he couldn't let them die. He couldn't go home and tell another soul their loved one had done their duty. And in his incapability, he has damned them all. 

 Inside his chest, the strings holding his broken heart together are snapping. Inside his head, the returned whispers are growing louder and louder with all the things he knows to be both true and wrong. He cannot stop them. He doesn’t know how. How do you fix hearts and heads again?

  _You can’t,_ the whispers say, _you are a failure and a shame and you couldn’t do it even if it could be done._

 Shut up, he tells them weakly, I beat you before, if I had help I could do it again.

_But you don’t, not anymore if you ever did, and lone wolves die. That’s that they do. They don’t get help._

 The thing is that he’s talking to himself and he knows it.

 He should go and talk to somebody, but Commander is dead, Ayame is dead, and Dai is gone. Even if they were here, there’s no guarantee they’d give him the time of day given what he’s done. Kakashi hasn’t come home at all in over a week and barely passed through even before that, having now more or less moved in with the Moris for the foreseeable future, and Sakumo isn’t so selfish to put his broken heart and head on his son’s shoulders. Fathers shouldn’t need their children to fix them. Kakashi doesn’t even know about the whispers in the first place.

 He should still go out and talk to somebody, anybody at all would do, but he can’t really do that. The village is in crisis now that the Third War has begun, resources are being relocated and strained already, and what stressed medic is going to want to talk with the man who started it all? They’d probably rather kill him on the spot than listen to him talk about the whispers come back into his head, and they might not be wrong.

 He can’t even really go out at all. Walking down the street is to invite the actual whispers of civilians and shinobi alike, who have nothing but disdain and disgust and fury for the man who has sent their village to war because he was selfish, weak, and failed in his duty. Going out in public now is akin to torture, and surely sunlight and fresh air cannot help enough to counter the hurt and humiliation of being _hated._ He’s been hurt before, humiliated before, but… he’s never been _hated_ before by the very people he’s dedicated his life and loyalty to for so long. It hurts most of all to know he deserves every last piece of their hate. 

 He should stick to a schedule, at the very least, but he doesn’t have one anymore. He doesn’t have Ayame or Commander or Dai to remind him to keep a routine, to keep busy, to keep some control. He’s been pulled from active duty for the foreseeable future, pending review and punishment, pending finding any responsibility they’re willing to trust him with again, and pending anyone willing to work with him again. The White Fang is a failure and everyone knows it now. 

 None of his acquaintances are speaking to him, sent away to war or refusing to look at him. He has no one to spar with, no one to chat with, no one to meet for lunch, and there are only so many things a man can do alone. He can’t go out and train, unwelcome at the training grounds, and he’s having trouble finding things that bring him joy anymore or goals to work towards.

 Kakashi brought him joy, but his son is rightfully ashamed of him now. How can he put the pressure of his broken happiness on his son’s shoulders, anyway? Kakashi has others things to do. His son isn’t wrong not to want the shame of being seen with his failure of a father. When was the last time Kakashi actually needed anything from him, anyway? Maybe he was always a failure of a father. 

 And what use is making personal goals in the face of war? War destroys all plans in the end. What use is wanting to visit a particular place when the borders are made of blood and fire? How can one even await the sequel of some silly book when the publisher is closed for their own safety? It’s impossible to think of even little things to achieve when there’s no one to share anything with and _everything_ he does always seems to end in failure anyway.

 He can’t make more promises if he’s only going to break them and everything else he touches.

 The thing is that there’s no way to fight the whispers this time. They’re too loud, there’s nothing else to drown them out, and there’s nothing to do to distract himself from the truths they wrongly remind him of. Time and effort, life and love, happiness… what did it mean in the end? The whispers always come back, as they’ve _always_ been there it seems, and they’re _winning._

 The thing is that Hatake Sakumo is alone.

 His days are blurring together, in haze of drinks to try and drown out the whispers, no careful hand and chiding words to stop him, and memories that make things so much worse that he’s beginning to forget what better even feels like. He found a photograph of his brother the other day, a loving farewell letter from his grandmother the day before, and so many old miserable thoughts of loneliness and loss from when he lost his pack the first time.

 He’s losing his pack again. He might have lost it already.

  _And lone wolves die,_ the whispers sigh, _that’s what they do if they have any honor. Do you?_


	2. Whims Against Whispers

 Sakumo didn’t expect there to be anyone in the graveyard.

 He went to the graveyard first to say his goodbyes to Ayame, to Mother, to Father, to Brother, and to _Pack._ He went to the graveyard first to say his goodbyes, his thanks, and then his apologies. He wanted to see them again, maybe say something private, hidden deep down and kept quiet under all the broken bits, about how he wished he could have been stronger and done better by them. After all: they didn't join Konoha, dedicating their clan to the village, for him to bring such shame and dishonor to their legacies with his inability to choose the political when the personal was bleeding over his hands. His hands are drenched with the whole village's blood now and he can only beg their forgiveness for failing to follow them in the line of duty. 

 Sakumo didn’t expect there to be anyone in the graveyard for this moment, having chosen the late hour in hopes of avoiding more condemnation, even knowing he deserves every piece of hatred spat his way. He wishes he didn’t have to visit his lost pack past midnight, like some secret in the dark, but he’s alone... and lost... and this is a last-minute whim of his. There’s just no time left before morning and he won’t be here in the morning. So he's here, now, for a last, private goodbye. 

 Except… he didn’t expect there to be anyone in the graveyard.

 He doesn’t notice their presence at first, too numb from the heavy thoughts and loud whispers and the chilling certainty of what he is finally about to do. He stumbled into the graveyard, footsteps clumsy and heavy enough to make his teachers cry with shame, and it was all he could do to collapse on his knees in front of Ayame’s grave, his fingers shaking and his broken heart thundering to make his shattered head hurt too.

 After a small eternity of deafening whispers and shame, after what could have been minutes or hours, Sakumo finally notices the soft sound of crying from somewhere else in the graveyard. It burns him at first, to think that there’s someone here to witness his final moments of weakness and shame.

 He wants to slip away, but he can’t ignore the crying now that he’s noticed it. It’s not the gentle sort of crying, but rather stifled wails and ragged gasps, the sort of devastated agony of sobs that he has only barely managed to keep from falling into in these last hours. The crying isn’t soft at all, now that he hears it, but nearly as loud as the whispers and it grates against his ears. He cannot ignore it. It's even louder than the whispers. 

 His knees might as well be water and there is nearly nothing left of him, but he finds some lingering strength to stand anyway. It takes him a long moment and he nearly falls several times, absolutely refusing to lean on any of the graves to pull himself up, but he stands. He’s appallingly weak.

 He can’t remember the last time he ate.

 At first, when he lays eyes on the source of the sobs, Sakumo thinks it’s a spirit of some kind. His broken heart and weakened lungs stutter at the sight of such bloody red hair spilled over a wide stone. The aura of agony surrounding the small, red-haired girl is strong enough to make the air tremble with it as he approaches, too. The air is literally trembling, buzzing with the roiling chakra inside her, and Sakumo in his numb, near dream-like state must wonder if he has encountered some sort of malevolent, powerful, grieving ghost of war.

 He makes to step away, to move back between the graves to return to Ayame or to stop putting off what needs to be done. The girl’s grief is none of his business. It is just a girl, he realizes quickly, feeling foolish for his thoughts of ghosts and spirits. And it is not just any girl, but rather the Shodaime’s wife’s great-niece who has recently lost her whole home village to the new war. That's the Uzushio Spiral on the gravestone. He has no right to intrude. None at all. 

 But then the girl looks up as he tries to leave her, to slip away. Perhaps he slipped by her notice before, but now that he has come closer, it seems the heaviness of his numb footsteps betray him to the only other person in the graveyard past midnight. And the look on her face stuns him where he stands.

 Uzumaki Kushina’s face is a blotchy wreck, stained nearly as red as her hair by her tears. She must be only sixteen or so, her cheeks and features are still round with child’s fat, her limbs and body terribly small and gangly despite her flak jacket and gear, and her snotty, wet devastation and the wide-eyed fear in her blue eyes make her look even younger. The air tenses as she sees him and realizes he’s seen her.

 They stare at each other for a long moment, each caught in secret griefs.

 “…My apologies for intruding,” Sakumo says finally, hoarsely, with as stable a bow as he can muster.

 He makes to leave, legs weak and footsteps still clumsy, but the girl is not so slowed by fear and there is a surprisingly strong hand around his elbow before he has gone five steps. He pauses, uncertain as to what is happening, taken aback by the warmth of her fingers and the power in her grip. Then he turns.

 “-I said _wait,_ ” the girl is saying, frowning up at him as she carefully releases him.

 Sakumo blinks. Did she? He didn’t hear her.

 “Sorry about that,” Sakumo says, forcing a tight smile up for her, “I was distracted.”

 The girl stares up at him, surprisingly intense considering the redness of her face, and says with equally surprising flatness, “Yeah, no _shit._ Some shinobi you are walkin’ around like this.”

 Sakumo isn’t sure what exactly she means by this, but she’s not wrong whatever she means.

 “Anyway, you ain’t gonna tell anyone about this, are you?” the girl says, squinting up at him. The redness in her face now seems like it may be partly from embarrassment, as well as tears. “Because I’ll beat you up if you tell anybody about this, y’know!”

 This is unexpected, Sakumo thinks, but it’s also not the first time a teenage girl has threatened to beat him up. He doesn’t count when he himself was a teenager, because then it would be too many times to count, but Ayame mentored one of the Inuzuka girls for a time and Inuzuka girls are not afraid to throw down with a grown man if they think he’s looked at woman wrong. Ayame took far too long to stop laughing and explain to Tsume that Sakumo was her husband.

 God, he misses her. Like a drowning man misses air, it feels like sometimes.  

 “I wouldn’t break your confidence in such a way,” Sakumo assures the girl. He can’t remember the last time keeping a smile was so exhausting. “I won’t tell anyone.”

 He won’t be able to tell anyone soon, anyway, since he’ll be gone before morning. The Uzumaki survivor’s grief in this graveyard, whoever she was mourning, is safely secret with a dead man on his way to his own grave.

 The girl looks suspicious at first, but then relents. “Good,” she says firmly, lifting her chin, folding her arms, and glaring in all her pint-sized ferocity. “I’ll know if you do, y’know!”

  _You’ll soon know that I didn’t,_ Sakumo doesn’t say.

 “I know,” he says instead.

 They stare at each other for a long moment again.

 Sakumo doesn’t know how to excuse himself. He doesn’t know how to open his mouth and speak a simple farewell; he doesn’t know how to turn away and walk back onto the path he was on; he doesn’t know how to finish this. So he just stands there, wearing a tight and faded smile, staring at this blotchy-faced girl glaring up at him, uncertain. Unable. This is truly… unexpected.

 Uzumaki Kushina opens her mouth again first, squinting at him, and says, “Are you alright, Uncle?”

  _God, no,_ Sakumo doesn’t say.

  _I’m a grown man, a father, a widower, and a veteran shinobi, and I can’t remember ever being alright in my whole life right now,_ he doesn’t say. _Sometimes I think that I’ve never been alright and I’m never going to be alright, so I might as well give up now. I don't have any honor left to compensate anymore._

  _I’m going to kill myself when I get home,_ he doesn’t say. _Maybe then things’ll be alright._

 “As well as can be expected,” Sakumo says instead, hoping his brightness doesn’t ring as hollow as he feels. The tight, tiring smile on his face strains as he stretches it further, however, so it probably does. “Thank you.”

 The girl squints at him a little more and for a moment, he thinks that she’ll let him go. What does a sixteen-year-old girl really care for the brokenness of a man who started the war that killed her village? Maybe she can see through his false front, maybe she can tell something is off about him, but she’ll surely write it off as grief, dismiss it for later or never, and let him go.

 He’ll be let go, he’ll go home, and then he’ll let go.

 “’Cause you look kinda like shit, y’know,” the girl says instead. “Like you got into a fight with shit and shit won, actually. No offense, Uncle.” This last part is added last minute, very offhand, before the girl’s glare fiercens and her tone turns sharper, “And you didn’t really answer my question, y’know? Are you alright or not? It’s a yes or no question, dummy, and I’m not _stupid._ ”

 Sakumo stares at her, lost, and it is all he can do to keep that tight, fake, straining smile on his face. He doesn’t know what to do. He doesn’t know what to say to this. He doesn’t want to lie to this girl he’s cost so much, but he can’t possibly admit or burden her with the horrible truth.

 “I’m…” he begins, uncertain of how the sentence ends.

  _I'm lost,_ he doesn't say. He knows exactly where he is, doesn't he? He's not lost. 

  _I'm in such terrible pain,_ he doesn't say. There are no injuries, no wounds, not even a single bleeding scratch to show. 

 And then, much to his horror and embarrassment, he is interrupted by the rumbling of his own stomach. He’s starving, he has known distantly for hours, unable to even remember the last time he’d eaten anything and largely able to ignore the low clawing at his insides. At least, until now, it seems. His stomach is making its emptiness very loudly known and very painfully felt right now.

 Sakumo pauses, a heady warmth burning at his face and ears, as the girl, unimpressed and frowning, looks between his face and his stomach. Finally, Uzumaki Kushina settles on his face and seems to come to a resolution. Arms still crossed, she straightens her spine and lifts her chin, prouder and more indomitable than anyone would ever expect a blotchy-faced teenage girl caught crying to be.

 “You should come over to my place for dinner!” she declares.

 He stares at her, even more lost than before, but she just nods as though she has made an infallibly logical and undeniably true statement that would only be contested by the most oblivious of fools. Though he has never had the opportunity to make conversation with her before, Sakumo has the sense that Uzumaki Kushina says quite a lot of things in this manner. If not everything. 

 “I always make too much food for one person,” the girl continues, as though it is the only thing to do to invite a near-stranger to dinner after a chance-meeting in a graveyard past midnight. “And I’m a really good cook, y’know, like ‘so good I have Akimichis begging at my door for my recipes every time I leave the window open’ _good_. No offense, Uncle, but you seem like you really need some good food.”

 “I couldn’t impo-”

 “My mum always said that good food fixes everything, y’know. And I say it too! Because honestly, what is there in the world that a really good bowl of ramen can’t fix, y’know?”

  _A lot of things,_ Sakumo doesn’t say. _Everything._

 “I’m sorry, but I can’t,” he says instead. “I have to be-”

 “Uncle, if you had better places to be, you wouldn’t be in a graveyard at two in the morning in the first place.”

 Sakumo wants to protest this flat statement, but she isn’t wrong, and Uzumaki Kushina clearly knows that she isn’t wrong. Sakumo is also quite a bit stunned by how wrong he was about the time. Past midnight and two in the morning are not at all the same thing. Where has time gone? Where is it all running so quickly?

 “C’mon, Uncle, are you really going to leave a girl all on her lonesome after you’ve caught her crying?”

 Well… yes... that is exactly what he planned on doing. He’s lived through a war and this is not the first time he’s happened on someone in an emotionally compromised state. They most often want to be left alone, he’s found, and it may be best to leave them alone for the time being depending on the situation. He wouldn’t dare to impose his incapable comfort on anyone right now, especially not this girl, and especially not when he plans to be gone so soon.

 “I-” Sakumo tries again.

 “You’re being really rude, y’know?” the girl interrupts. “Are you really gonna make a girl beg for some company or what?” She makes an indignant huff, then turns accusing, reddened, piercingly blue eyes on him. “You shouldn’t leave a girl to eat alone, y’know.”

 Sakumo closes his mouth, lost, uncertain. He doesn’t know how to excuse himself. He has to go home, he has to end this, but he doesn’t know how to turn away and walk down the path he should return to. Morning is so close, there’s so little time left, and the whispers are still _so_ loud and incessant, but…

 But the immoveable being that has settled on a sudden whim – and will now stick with it possibly even after the sun freezes over – named Uzumaki Kushina says, “C’mon, Uncle, my treat!”


	3. Down The Long Rain Pipe

 Sakumo is still lost, still uncertain, and still tugged at and guilted by the whispers that will not let him forget that his time is running away from him. And yet – despite his heavy footsteps, aching head, and detached senses – he manages to half-follow and half-be-pulled through the darkened side-streets of Konoha by a determined, if anxious, teenage girl who’s been talking all the way.

 This isn’t how it was supposed to go, but he doesn’t know how to stop it. The whispers are loud and persistent, remaining him of the time slipping through his fingers and the path that he must return to if he has any honor and wants any sanctuary. He _must_ leave. He cannot stay.

 And yet when this girl takes his hand, he doesn’t know how to let go.

 “Ooh, this way, Uncle, it’s faster!” Uzumaki Kushina says, grabbing his hand and yanking him down a side street before the unknown people at the other end of the emptied street can come any closer. “I know _all_ the best shortcuts and hiding spots in Konoha, y’know! This way is soooo much faster!” 

 Sakumo is rather distracted by the breathtaking warmth of her fingers and the unshakeable strength of her grip, and can only follow, feeling stunned. She takes his hand as though he doesn't have the village's blood on his hands by the coming war. Before he knows what’s happening, the girl has pulled him all the way down the side street and they are in the process of climbing a compost bin to slide over a fence that definitely had a NO TRESPASSING sign on it.

 “The old auntie that lives here doesn’t really mean that, y’know! She wields a mean broom but I think she’s kinda lonely and likes having someone to shout at again. She gets _real_ creative with her cursing, y’know, I think I learned ten new words from her this month alone.”

 “That’s… nice,” Sakumo says, as she leads him carefully through someone’s carefully kept garden, up another fence, along said fence, and then down a long drain pipe into another side alley on a whole level lower than the last street.

 He nearly falls through the crate that she lands on and skips off effortlessly, but just manages to fling himself against the nearest wall before bouncing to the ground, leaving only a slight crack in the wood of the crate. All this, of course, while Uzumaki Kushina has a tight grip on his hand. He’s yanked along again by a laughing, still blotchy-eyed teenage girl before he can even consider if he has anyone to apologize to for that.

 Even if he wasn’t numb-footed and light-headed, even if he hadn’t spent the past weeks in a gutter of grief, Sakumo would have difficulty following Uzumaki Kushina’s twisting path through layers of Konoha that he does not regularly consider or see. Her shortcuts are made for a short and slight teenage girl with a considerable amount of energy and flexibility, as well as a disinterest in property boundaries and an _alarming_ degree of creativity - not at all made for a tall and broad grown man. It takes a degree of spontaneously creativity from him that he hasn’t used in quite some time to follow her path with his height and weight, _while_ attached at the hand.

 “-anyway, so _I_ said to Mai that she could tell her mum to stuff it, because there was _no way_ that I was doing something like that on my own, y’know? And besides, I told her, did she really want me doing something like _that_ – in her words: ‘the dumbest bullshit to ever be bullshitted by any bullshitter ever’ – on my own? What kind of friend leaves a friend hangin’ like that, y’know?”

 Sakumo does not know, too dizzied to properly follow the conversation and too busy trying to focus on putting one foot in front of the other. Her hand is so warm, her hair is so red, and her voice is so bright that the whispers can only cower from the chattering light. He must go, but…

 “And everything _did_ got to shit, of course, but it was a good thing I had Mai because it was when she shoved me out a window to save my ass that I found that shortcut! They were gainin’ on us and Mai was like, ‘You gotta go,’ and I was like, ‘Fuck you, I’m not leavin’ you’, y’know? But then Mai was like, ‘Fuck you, you are,’ and _shoved,_ and I bounced off that wall and swung around the corner by trying to catch myself on the pipe and rolled down the roof and straight into that alley! Bam! Found the best shortcut of my _life_ and I almost believed for a sec that Mai just has aim that good, y’know, but it turns out she had no idea – she just sprinted the other direction and hoped I hadn’t gone splat, that _bitch._ ”

 The girl doesn’t even seem to mind that Sakumo does not have the energy to both follow her path and engage in her equally wily conversation. She is clearly talking to him, but there is no expectation that he respond, nor does there appear to be a demand that he pay any sort of attention or retain anything she is telling him. It also appears that her talk is for her own anxiousness, her own awkwardness and uncertainty with this strange situation – to fill the silence, more than it might be to drown his whispers in bright liveliness.

 “The prank totally flopped, of course, but I’m real glad Mai was there to save me from my own bullshit, y’know? And Mai is _definitely_ more important t’me than pranks, no matter how much of an asshole that dick was being and what a good cause it was. So of course I had to save her from my bullshit, y’know, even if she shoved me out a window five minutes later. We’re still friends and that’s what matters, y’know? And I got an awesome shortcut out of the whole thing! So… worth it, y’know? It’s a great shortcut, right, Uncle? Look, we’re already here!”

 Sakumo looks up and has about three seconds to take in the small apartment building in front of him before he’s being yanked inside. It’s one of the older and shabbier buildings, the ones usually crowded with single, childless, clanless, younger shinobi or shinobi-adjacent civilians who just want a relatively decent, cheap, and warm broom closet to crash in when they’re in-village. It’s one of the nicer ones, but it’s still not the sort of place he would have expected an Uzushio princess to live.

 The entire place smells like _cat._ And Sakumo suddenly recalls, not long ago, amusedly citing that as just one of the reasons he was vetoing Kakashi’s curiosity towards experiencing moving out of the house after making genin. Since Kakashi, of course, was not going to be deterred by prospects like paying bills or having to make his own food, but rather interacting with other people and their strange smells and sounds. 

 Sakumo’s concerns about this teenage girl living on her own, however, are mollified by the intricate and complex seal work covering her second-floor apartment door. He has more than enough experience as a shinobi to be capable of basic sealing and making sense of more advanced work, but he doesn’t recognize any part of the swirling, overlapping, and more circular and complex sealing style that flashes over the door as Uzumaki Kushina appears to disarm her apartment’s protections. There’s a very warning sort of hum, for a moment, before the glow settles back into the woodwork.

 “So, this is… me,” Uzumaki Kushina says, awkwardly, pushing the door open. “C’mon in, Uncle.”

 The girl pulls him over the threshold, into the apartment, and the door closes with a quiet click and brief hum behind him. The girl lets go of his hand to kick off her shoes and move deeper into the small apartment and he immediately feels the loss of warm grip. With little clue of what else to do or what to possibly say to all of this, Sakumo looks around the place that Uzumaki Kushina calls home.

 It’s… small… but it’s cozy, in the simultaneously cluttered and clean sort of way. It’s just one room, besides the tiny washroom attached. There’s a curtained-off sleeping area and dresser, a small kitchen that’s little more than a sink, a stove, cabinets, and a bit of counter, a small table covered in drying laundry by the one window, and a sitting area made of cushions and a haphazardly organized bookshelf. He can’t really take a step without risking bumping into either a laundry basket, a space-heater, or a box of sketchbooks and journals, but the room is warm and smells clean and homey.

 It feels like a balm, in some ways, and a quiet sort of agony in others. There’s a small collection of sea shells on the bookshelf, a dress with distinct colors and style of embroidery hanging over a chair, and familiarly foreign wind chimes and ornament dangling by the window. Looking at these remnants, the whispers brush past all distractions to remind him he has no right to be here, no right to intrude.

 “Take your shoes off, Uncle, and have a seat already,” the girl interrupts, already banging through her cupboards for pots and her fridge for ingredients. “I’ll have food ready in no time flat, you’ll see! Best and fastest cook in Konoha, y’know! I should have opened a restaurant, really, but I guess it’s too late for that now.”

 Sakumo looks at her – her and her rounded cheeks, knobby limbs, and bright youth. If she weren’t a kunoichi, if she weren’t the bearer of a terrifying inheritance, he would never be able to consider her anything other than a child. As it is, all he can think of her as is a child who has had to grow up far too fast – just like his son, only a little older, only a little more worn.

 Just like him, only less.

 “You’re sixteen,” Sakumo says, hoarsely, offering her a reassuring smile. Happiness feels fake on his face, so it may not be his best of smiles, but surely it is better than nothing. “You still have plenty of time to open that restaurant.”

  _You have all the time in the world, and I’ll be gone by morning,_ he doesn’t say.

 The girl pauses in raiding her fridge, arms full of food, and turns to look at him. Her face is still slightly red, but that’s the only sign he caught her crying. Her expression is very flat and she squints at him with the sort of wrinkled-nose openness that he hasn’t seen in a while.

 “Uncle, I’m _seventeen,_ ” Uzumaki Kushina says.

 Oh, that’s a little stunning. Time goes by so quickly, doesn’t it? It seems like only yesterday that that procession from Uzushio first came to Konoha during the Founding Festival. Sakumo doesn’t remember much of it, unfortunately – the Uzukage was there, he thinks, and there was maybe some sort of water jutsu show by their sister village – but the girl must have come to Konoha with that group. Time is always running by so quickly. Where is it even going?

 “Sorry,” Sakumo says, “Seventeen. That’s almost _ancient_ , isn’t it?”

 The familiar teasing feels at once natural and clumsy on his tongue, and as soon as the poor, awkward joke leaves him, he regrets it. He has no right to tease this girl, to make jokes; he has no right to intrude. He has overstepped; he has outstayed his welcome. He must go, he cannot stay-

 “Look, _Grandpa’s_ got _jokes,_ ” Uzumaki Kushina says, scowling, as she kicks her fridge shut. “Ugh, people were right about you, y’know -”

 Sakumo’s heart stops for a moment…

 “- you’re such a _dad_ ,” she finishes, disgustedly. “Take your shoes off, Uncle, you’re being rude.”

 …and then continues with only a stutter, leaving him feeling a bit breathless.

 The clock ticking silently on the way, with cat’s ears and a swinging tail, tells him it’s a few minutes past three in the morning. It’s hours yet until sunrise, so… _Maybe there is, actually, time left before morning,_ he decides. He can spend some time here, to indulge this determined, grieving girl, before he leaves. He has time to be polite, before he is dutiful. Not too long, of course, but there is time.

 Sakumo carefully takes off his shoes and sets them neatly by the door, taking a few moments longer to turn the pile of shoes the girl has clearly just been kicking off into a neat line. Then, because he has already bent over, it is not much more work to straighten the boxes and heater cord, and to pick up the few books closest to him and at least get them off the floor. 

 When he looks up, head a little dizzied from the sudden blood rush of straightening again, his vision clears to see Uzumaki Kushina frowning at him. She’s in the middle of chopping vegetables and there’s already a pan sizzling on the stove, but she’s staring right at him.

 “Oh my god, you really are _such a dad,_ ” she says.

 “Sorry,” Sakumo says, face heating, looking around for a place to put the books.

 Kushina makes a scoffing sound, scraping the chopped vegetables into the pan without even looking. “Hey, Uncle, if you’re gonna tidy my house for me, I ain’t gonna stop you, y’know. If anything, I’m the one who’s gotta apologize for inviting you over when I left my stuff everywhere,” she says, face reddening slightly as she finally breaks eye contact. “I kinda forgot, y’know? Sorry ‘bout that.”

 Sakumo isn’t sure what to say here, because he really doesn’t mind. Her home is a lot cleaner than his was getting in his grief, before he cleaned it earlier while putting all his affairs in order. _Better a few books on the floor than a dozen emptied bottles,_ he doesn’t say, because that would be a truly poor joke as well as a very sad statement.

 “Those can go on the bookshelf, Uncle. Just put ‘em anywhere and come sit.”


	4. Three-Thirty in the Morning Meal

 Sakumo puts the books away and goes to have a seat at the little table by the window, after Kushina realizes she’s left her laundry to dry all over it and hurriedly clears her clothes into the nearest basket and off to the side. Her face is nearly bright red by the time she’s done and forcefully gestures for him to sit, so Sakumo does sit and doesn’t comment on how she clearly wasn’t ready to receive guests when she’d invited him over for a past-midnight meal in the graveyard.

 For a terrible moment, Sakumo thinks that there will be awkward silence which will give the whispers time to speak and grate at him once more. But fortunately, blessedly, Kushina starts up her anxious, embarrassed chatter again. Her attempt to distract herself from the fact she left her laundry on the chairs – something that is endearingly normal – is so much more preferable to listen to than the vicious insistence of the whispers that can _wait._

 “-I couldn’t believe it, y’know, me lookin’ at this grown ass man-boy who thinks he’s a shinobi and he’d never done laundry in his _life_. What the hell, y’know? ‘My mom is the one who does the laundry back at home,’ he says, like that’s some excuse for lacking basic life skills, all while he looks at me like I’m supposed to show his dumb ass how to do laundry or, like, do it for him. I’m like, ‘Hell, no, go ask your poor mom and then do her laundry for her for once.’ I ran out of there so fast, Uncle. So fast.”

 Sakumo watches her putter capably around in her tiny kitchen, familiar with every crook and cabinet of it, animatedly talking the whole time. He can’t really remember the last time someone bothered to make him a meal. He cooks at home for him and Kakashi, of course, when he’s home. And he and Dai, single fathers that they are, tend to go out for a meal when they have time to meet up.

  _Had time,_ the whispers try to remind him. _There’s no time left for you. Why are you here at all? Do you have even less honor than none at all, wasting your time intruding on this girl? Lone wolf, you are a twisting, dishonorable coward._

 “And _then_ I learn – you won’t believe this, Uncle – that this guy is the fucker who’s been setting off the fire alarms every month because he can’t cook either! Like, what the hell, you know? That’s why cup noodles are a thing, Cousin! And maybe I’d be able to be nicer or more considerate to him, y’know, if he hadn’t afterwards once tried to tell me that he knew _so_ much about sealing and could even make me my own explosive tags!”

 Sakumo almost snorts at that, even though he doesn’t really have the energy to laugh, because trying to one-up any Uzumaki in sealing is like trying to lecture an Inuzuka in dogs. They already know more than you do, have probably forgotten more than you’ll ever know about the subject, and it’s a quick ticket to getting your teeth punched in.

 “So I said to him, ‘Cousin, I will carve the most beautiful explosive tag you have ever seen into your _ass_ and _light it_ if you don’t shut up and get out of my way!’ He moved so fast! Good thing, too, since I was on my way to do laundry and really didn’t have time for this stuff, y’know. I kinda think he was tryin’ to get me to help him with laundry, because it’s either that or the saddest attempt at flirting I have ever ignored. I pity the civilian girl who makes herself put up with him someday, Uncle, honestly!”

 Again, there is no expectation that Sakumo respond, no engaging and exhausting answers required for him to be a part of this conversation. All he has to do is listen, but it doesn’t even seem that he has to do that, if he can’t manage it properly. He can’t remember the last time someone did this for him either, although it’s probably the last time he and Dai went out to lunch. It’s not having someone to talk to – he wouldn’t even dare dream of putting his burdens on this girl’s shoulders – but it’s good all the same.

 Kushina realizes she forgot to offer him something to drink, soon, and scrambles to set a glass of water in front of him. She doesn’t stop apologizing or relax until he takes a sip, no matter how many times he reassures her, and he didn’t realize just how thirsty he was. He’s parched, actually. He drinks several glasses of water over the course of her cooking, each one being refilled the moment it gets low, as Kushina launches into a furiously apologetic story explaining that she can’t offer him tea because she threw her teapot at ‘Namikaze’s _dumb_ blond face’ yesterday and he hasn’t returned it yet.

 By the time Kushina finishes making their meal, it’s halfway through the hour, and Sakumo has heard a number of complaints on what may just be every single one of her neighbors and learned quite a bit about his host. Not personal history or information, exactly, but Uzumaki Kushina’s personality shines through every story, bright and fiery, despite… despite everything.

 “Here’s the promised meal, Uncle, and you gotta be honest with me about it, alright? I don’t wanna be good because people are too scared to tell me I’m not, y’know,” Kushina says, setting two enormous steaming bowls of food on the table. “You like fish, right? The spices and veggies are Uzu style, so it might be a bit different, y’know, but I can make something else if y’don’t like it.”

 “No, I… it’s good,” Sakumo reassures her. “Thank you for the meal.”

 Again, Kushina doesn’t relax until he takes a bite, and again, Sakumo didn’t realize exactly how hungry he was. His stomach has been quietly scratching at his insides since the graveyard, grumbling every now and again, especially since the smell of good food started filling the apartment air. He really can’t remember the last time he ate something.

 True to her word, Uzumaki Kushina is a very good cook.

 “Are you sure you’re too ancient to open that restaurant?” Sakumo asks her, after savoring several mouthfuls of rice and fish. “This is delicious.” It is _very_ delicious, so much so that some part of him wants to immediately throw it back up, after so long without eating. He forces it down despite that, even though he really shouldn’t be eating with his plans.

 Kushina turns slightly red, from her cheeks to her ears, and beams brightly at the same time that she tries to take the compliment in cool stride. “Well, it’s good to know my business would have at least customer, Uncle,” she says, stabbing her chopsticks into her own bowl.

 “…What about the Akimichi begging for your recipes?”

 The girl turns even redder, much to the stirring of amusement settling under Sakumo’s breast.

 “Did I say that?” she mutters. “I say a lot of stuff when I talk, y’know, Uncle. You shouldn’t really listen to that stuff.” She then proceeds to shove quite a lot of food into her mouth, as though stuffing her cheeks with it will somehow unsay every potentially embarrassing statement earlier made. Then, barely understandable and very quietly, she adds, “’S’mof’lee bull’frit, yunno, Uncle.”

 “I don’t see any proof of that,” Sakumo answers, and the false smile comes a little easier now.

 He’s been a shinobi for a long time and the younger generations never cease to amaze him. As sorry as he is for what he’s done, for what they’ll have to face because of him, for the war that will destroy so many of them, there is still the rebellious hope that they will survive it… that they will live and they will thrive. Uzumaki Kushina’s simultaneous shining confidence and crippling shyness feed that weak, unreasonable, ridiculous hope.

 Kushina grimaces, turning even redder, and then looks up and… pauses.

 “Uncle,” she says, “are you good… like… really?”

 Sakumo swallows the block in his throat, feeling all of a sudden both hoarse and watery. “As good as can be expected,” he says again, blocking up his false smile a little better, probably failing.

 Kushina narrows her eyes at him, chewing, then swallows, and for a terrible moment, he thinks she’ll push at him. She’ll decry his smile as fake, his calm as false, and him as nothing more than a failure and façade of a once honorable person. She’ll demand to know why he’s lying to her, throw him out of her home as a shameful and ungrateful guest, and then he’ll be let go and… be gone before morning.

 “If you are, like, allergic to fish and just tryin’ t’be nice, Uncle, that’s actually really rude,” Kushina says instead, stabbing at her food and then stuffing her face like some sort of starving rodent. She has rice stuck to her face and keeps talking with her mouth food like she’s well-practiced at it, and it’s sort of captivating in some strange and horrifying way. “Because I can’t keep endin’ up in the hospital at four in the morning, y’know, it’s embarrassing. If you’re just gonna be sick because you hate fish, you gotta aim for the window or the trash can. Because I broke my mop over my friend’s head last month, Uncle, and she still hasn’t gotten me a new one yet.”

 If Sakumo had not encountered his fair share of Uzumaki – _when there were still Uzumaki around to encounter_ – he would swear that Uzumaki Kushina was part Inuzuka. Some memory of Ayame’s snorting giggles breaks through the low, constant whispers for a moment and leaves a brief warmth in his chest.

  “You aren’t actually allergic to fish, right…?” Kushina squints up at him, from across the table, swallowing her mouthfuls of food. “Uncle, I’m serious. I need an _actual_ answers for this one.”

 “I’m not allergic,” Sakumo reassures her.

 “Awesome, no hospital trips tonight. If you’re good, then you should _eat._ It’s best while it’s hot, y’know! I mean, like, you don’t _have_ to eat it, y’know, but this dish doesn’t really taste as good as leftovers.”

 Sakumo does not imagine that Uzumaki Kushina is the sort to have leftovers in her home. Well, perhaps she is, given that she claims to always make too much, but he’s sure that was at least partly a ploy to get him here and watching her eat would make him feel full if his stomach weren’t somewhere between starving and sick. Still, at her behest, he makes an effort not to be rude. Eating is surprisingly painful, like a dizzied and wounded effort, but he manages enough to make his host stop making narrowed eyes at him and his bowl.

 “Thank you for the meal,” Sakumo says again, once he’s finished a respectable amount and his host has long since practically licked her bowl clean. “It was delicious.”

 Kushina goes a little red again, as she stands and clears the table. “Thanks,” she says. “I learned from my mum. She’s the best cook on the whole island, y’know?”

 There’s a strained silence for a moment, as the dishes clack against the pan in the sink. Kushina leans against the counter, oddly still, and Sakumo sits at the table with that haunting set of wind chimes hanging over his shoulder. There’s no wind for them, since the window’s closed at the moment, but he can see the patterns and colors of the ornament in the corner of his eye.

 “Let me help with the dishes,” Sakumo says, standing with only some effort. His knees are like water and his legs are weak, but this time, he has the table to lean on.

 The girl doesn’t object as he thought she might. Kushina is oddly quiet, oddly stiff, as she moves out of the way of the sink to lean on another section of counter. As Sakumo moves to the sink and starts washing up, she takes a near silent, shuddering breath and starts putting away any leftovers or ingredients into their places.

 “Thanks, Uncle,” she says, quietly.


	5. The Rules of the Game

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I reference characters from my [Team Seven vs. Paperwork](http://archiveofourown.org/series/376589) series here a lot. It's not necessary at all that you be familiar with them, but if you're looking for a good time and want to understand what they're about, then I definitely recommend the series.

 For a while, there are no sounds in the apartment but the rush of the tap and the clacks of crockery as Sakumo washes up. Even the constant whispers seem to fade into a faraway background for a moment, as Sakumo lets himself focus on nothing but the mundane task in front of him.

 But after a small eternity of quiet, after what could have been several minutes or one, Sakumo cannot help but hear a soft, hitched sob from behind him. The sound burns at him and he can’t ignore it, as much as he knows how embarrassing it is to have people witness your weakness and shame, as kind as it may be to pretend he has become momentarily deaf. So he puts the second bowl into the small drying rack, turns off the tap, and turns to the girl behind him.

 Uzumaki Kushina is leaning against her cabinets, back to the room, with her face pressed into a dish towel in an attempt to stifle the tears dripping from her face and sobs wracking her shoulders. She looks so small, even as a buzzing agitation begins to thrum through the air of the room.

 He should step away, some part of him thinks, to move back and give her as much space as she needs. He is in no place to offer comfort or condolences, and it is not his place to dare, given what he’s done to her. He, of all people, has no right to intrude on her grief.

 But, once again, Kushina looks up as he hesitates, perhaps noticing that the tap has been turned off, and once again the look on her face stuns him where he stands. She’s red-faced and blotchy under the stream of tears and runny nose, her eyes even redder and her expression all scrunched up with the failing effort to stifle or stop herself. Somehow, she looks even younger still in this mess.

 “I keep forgetting my mum’s dead,” she says, somewhere between disbelieving and almost like she’s trying to tell a joke, voice hitching on every other word. “I haven’t seen her in years but…” The stream of tears gets thicker and her shoulders tremble. “Suddenly… I miss h-er? I don’t kn- I miss her and Dad _so-ooo mu-uch._ ”

 Sakumo is truly stunned; uncertain of what to say, unable to act at all, much less well. His losses have been with him for so long now, even Ayame’s, and he has no words of comfort to offer. He misses them still, but… Life went on and he stopped thinking of many members of his old pack on a daily or even weekly basis, which is a poor comfort: the miserable thought that eventually one just gets used to having everyone be gone.

 It’s no comfort at all, actually.

 Kushina sniffles, then sputters on her latest failure to stifle her tears and gasps, breaking out into something that might be coughing or laughter. “…Sorry, Uncle,” she gasps, once she’s gotten enough breath back to spit out the words. She sounds like she’s trying to be cheerful, but her tone falls abysmally short of sincere. “I’m being a real rude host, aren’t I?”

 “No,” Sakumo says. “It was rude of me to intrude.”

 “C-can’t intrude if I invited you, Uncle.”

 Sakumo could argue that point; he could argue that point stridently – and doesn’t it feel strange to want to stridently argue a point again – but he doesn’t. He’s a terrible guest, but he’s not so terrible a guest as that. Kushina has been a lovely hostess. That she would welcome the man who essentially doomed her village into her home for an unconventional meal is brilliant beyond words as it is.

 Instead of arguing, instead of leaving, Sakumo just stands there as Uzumaki Kushina sobs quietly into a dishtowel. He’s lived through war. Sometimes, more often than not, all it took to comfort a comrade or a subordinate was to exist alongside them for a time.

 “I f-feel like a _kid,_ ” Kushina says unhappily, between wiping desperately at her face. “Sorry about this stupid r-rain, Uncle.”

  _You are a kid,_ Sakumo doesn’t say. _You’re a child who should still be spending her days making ridiculous faces, laughing and smiling, and rolling in the grass until your hair is a tangle of sticks and dirt if that’s what you wanted to do. Don’t waste yourself on masks; don’t bother containing yourself for my sake. Rain and storm if that’s how you feel, please. Please, please, please do._

_You’re a girl who’s seen too much. The world’s trying to make you a woman too soon, to take your joy and give you grief instead, and it has no right. You deserve so much more than tiredness and sorrow. I’m so sorry you’ve experienced things that make you feel old in all the wrong ways._

_But there are years ahead of you yet. Decades. Life in all its ups and down, love in all its shapes and sizes, and the little joys that make you push through the day. You have no idea who you could be, where you might be, how different things will be years and years from now. There’s so much time._

_You’re so much younger than you know,_ he doesn’t say.

 “It’s no problem,” he says instead.

 Kushina’s grief makes the very air of her apartment shudder with the strength of her being, either a side-effect of her burden or her bloodline. Her chakra is buzzing again now, nothing like the roiling wrath of the graveyard but still noticeable. Civilians would probably flee without knowing why, tasting a tingle in the air, feeling goosebumps over their skin. The manifestation of emotion may press against the cracks in Sakumo’s piecemeal heart, but it’s not much of a problem.

 It’s uncomfortable, and it’s sad, but it’s not a problem.

 “Would you like to learn something that’s both reassuring and not?” Sakumo finds himself saying.

 “I’m a-always down for that sh-shit, Uncle,” Kushina answers, her bravado belied by a sniffle.

 “You’re probably not going to feel like a grown-up most of the time,” Sakumo tells her. “You might stop feeling like a kid as experience comes, but there are some feelings you don’t lose… like feeling lost… or confused… or lonely.”

 The words somehow manage to fly out of his mouth, despite the fact that every syllable has been a struggle so far. The experiences of comforting dozens of subordinates, comrades, and friends through the horrors of both war and peacetime spill out of the cracks in his heart now, and he only hopes he can dam it.

 He’s seen so much. He’s see trained warriors break apart or threaten to snap too many times. There was always a feral look in the eyes... or a terribly empty one… that still haunts his scarce amounts of sleep. A waking nightmare that lingers in the desperate mind of his mind that couldn’t let his comrades die, and was  too terrified to even consider that his actions might mean war until it was over. Or maybe aware and simply too terrified of the threat of duty to care.

 Sakumo borrows Ayame’s words for this one.

 “Grown-up,” he says as was said to him, “implies you’re all done growing.”

  _‘I won’t have it!’_ Ayame declared. _‘I’m not done!’_

 “But there’s always plenty of growing to do. You might stop growing tall, but you can still grow strong. Grow clever, grow wise, grow rich, or grow wide,” Sakumo lists off, tasting the old rhyme with a fondness he didn’t quite remember until now.

  _‘Plants still grow, even when they’re not doing much of anything. They might not seem to do anything besides drink and flower and make it through, year after year, but they still grow just by being. Anyone claiming to be truly grown-up is only refusing to acknowledge what’s happening whether they want it to or not, which is unnatural if you ask me. They should let change be.’_

 “Maybe not much and maybe not cleanly or expectedly, but growing up doesn’t really stop.”

  _‘And if nothing else comes to mind, then at least grow old,’_ Ayame’s voice says. _‘In the right time. As kind as you can, to both yourself and everyone else. If you can manage it._

_‘Mum always said in the end you’d be grateful if you did._

_‘Figured you should maybe listen to someone who’s actually made it, eh? Can’t get much perspective from the other saplings, since they’re all the same height, but the old tree knows a thing or two from all the way up there.’_

 “And with it, neither does the feeling of being lost… or out of control… and wanting comfort, even if it’s long gone and little more than nostalgia,” Sakumo says, calling up his false smile one more time. “Which… yes… may feel childish.”

 Kushina, who’s spent most of his small speech crying into a dishtowel, looks up at him with wide eyes. She’s still crying, tears are still running quickly down her reddened face apparently against her will, her nose is running, and by a spasm of the shoulders and a small _hic_ sound, it’s clear that she’s given herself the hiccups. She looks nothing like a warrior or a weapon; she looks exactly like the kid she said she felt like and Sakumo could swear he can feel the wind whistling through his cracked heart.

 Kushina hiccups again, the buzzing air hiccupping with her. _Hic!_ And she mops at her soaked face with the dishtowel, even though she tears don’t show any sign of stopping.

 “I gue-ess,” she says. “Th-anks, Uncle.”

 “You’re welcome,” Sakumo replies, awkwardly, self-awareness settling back in.

 And along with that come the whispers again, murmuring disgustedly at him for forcing poor advice and badly said words on a girl whose grief is his own fault to begin with. Kushina looks no better after his comfort. The whispers insist he’s made it worse… he’s intruding… he needs to _go._

  _Just go already._

 He opens his mouth to make his long-overdue excuses and is interrupted by a hiccup.

 “Uncle?” Kushina says, through her air-trembling tears. “This is ki-inda awkward, but wo-uld you stay?”

 It’s nearly morning, he can’t.

 “I’ve been kinda dancin’ around it, Uncle. Sorry. I should’ve been up front with it,” Kushina says, sniffling, shoulders curling in. “I sorta kidnapped you and that – _hic –_ was weird because you pro-obably don’t want to be drowned here, but I… don’t want to be alone anymore… right now. Y’know?”

 He shouldn’t.

 Kushina hiccups again, her blotched face turning a deeper shade of red as she continues, “I mean, y’don’t have to if y’don’t wanna, y’know. This’s wei– _hic_ –rd, I get’it. But what were you even doing in the graveyard so late anyway? Crying? _Hic._ That’s just sad, Uncle, sorry. Suuuper sad.”

 Sakumo looks down at the red girl in front of him, confused, then bemused despite himself as she grins at him through her own crying. Smiling looks like it’s taking enormous effort, but Kushina pushes past swollen eyes and a snotty nose to leer at him.

 “Just patheee- _hic,_ Uncle, really.”

 “Ouch,” Sakumo says mildly, because that sort of melodrama at least deserves an answer.

 “Yeah, that’s right,” Kushina says, then hiccups again. “Shaaaame, Uncle. Shaaaame.”

 “Uh huh.”

 Kushina takes a deep breath, then looks him in the eye more grimly. “Figured that you couldn’t have anywhere better to be if you were there too, y’know? Might as well make you keep me company, right? Probably not like you’ve got anywhere to be tomorrow morning or anything.”

 “I…”

 “And if y’do, then since it’s already tomorrow, you’re fucked for sleep. Sorry, Uncle. At least I’ve fed you, I guess. _Hic._ You don’t have anywhere to be, do you, Uncle? Anybody waiting up?”

  _No friends, no family, no pack. No one._

 “…No,” Sakumo admits.

 Kushina brightens and says, “That sucks. Me too, Uncle.”

  _Yes, I know, and it’s my fault,_ he doesn’t say, even though they were all a country away and Uzumaki Kushina would be alone here in Konoha either way. It’s still his fault they’re dead.

 “That… sucks,” he offers instead.

 “I know, right? So, how’bout it, Uncle? Wanna be alone together for a while and, I dunno, ugly cry or something? _Hic._ I’m winning, though, so maybe not. We could just keep eating until we pass out, I think I even have some sweets I haven’t pigged on in a cupboard, and that’s always fun. Miko stole all my booze, so we can’t get drunk, which’s pro- _hic -_ bably for the best, y’know.”

  _Probably,_ Sakumo’s mind echoes, slightly dumbfounded. He just pulled himself out of the pickling jar and there probably couldn’t be a less appropriate way to dive back in to drunken temptation than with the teenage Uzumaki princess as a drinking partner.

 “You’d definitely lose _that_ competition too, Uncle, no offense, and I gotta leave you some pride here. So maybe no board games either. Y’know, I dunno if I even have all the pieces for some of them, ‘cause Mai keeps stealing them for plotting spy shit and then we plot pranks or adventure stories ‘n’ stuff too, all military style, so... Which, y’know, being fair, is _way_ more interesting to do than playing regular board games. I mean, sometimes a cute game of Shogi is – _hic –_ good, and then sometimes you just wanna play Super Ninja Adventures with the Shogi board as a prop because it’s way more fun if all the pieces are characters that have hidden motivations and backstories and shit, y’know? And putting bloody battles _in_ the game actually does fucking wonders for the pent-up aggression when Mai tricks my character and blackmails her. The bitch.”

 Sakumo blinks down at Kushina, whose crying is stopping as she illustrates her fast-paced speech with inventive hand gestures. He feels somewhat like he did while she had a death-grip on his hand and was yanking him off rooftops and down pipes, in a metaphorical sense in this conversation.

 “I’m… unfamiliar with that game,” Sakumo says.

 “Well, _duh,_ Uncle. We made it up when regular Shogi got bo- _hic -_ ring. Not to say that regular Shogi is always boring, because sometimes you gotta stick to the classics, but sometimes you just gotta invent complex backstories for your pieces and add three more boards to make some proper continents and then _woo!_ It’s out of control and you’ve got a completely different play-acting game. I’d tell you the rules, but that’d take at least a week and it’s better to watch or learn as you go. You should sit in on our next adventure mission! Mai’s the game-master and she’s cookin’ up a good one, y’know, Miko’s promised not to try to kill Tsume again, Hanako’s coming and she’s just great, and maybe Namikaze’ll be there too since he’s such a fucking nerd. (Only if he gives my teapot back, of course.) _Hic._ You can sit with Taiki to watch, y’know, since he’s not allowed to play after last time.”

 Sakumo tries to match people to the names being thrown around. Mai and Miko, unfortunately, he only knows through Kushina’s talking. Tsume, he’ll assume is Inuzuka Tsume if someone was trying to kill her, since the young girl that Ayame mentored was and still is… memorably combative. Namikaze must mean the Sannin Jiraiya’s genius student, a charismatic teenager who Sakumo’s seen in frequent passing. Hanako and Taiki, he thinks, are the names of the Sannin Jiraiya’s other two students.

 “I mean, you’re a _bit old_ to be hanging out with us, Uncle, but it wouldn’t be that weird. You could bring your kid and Miko and Hana could bring some of their cousins, I think they’re around the same age, and we’d probably have to do it at Hana’s house because it’s the only one big enough, but the Moris _love_ throwing parties, y’know?”

 “I… Yes, they do,” Sakumo manages, his heartbeat stumbling at the mention of his son. _Kakashi._ His son who is already staying with that particular clan and wants nothing to do with him. “But, I couldn’t-”

 “Well, sheesh, Uncle, you haven’t even heard the rules or the game. Don’t knock it ‘til you’ve at least tried it, y’know,” Kushina says, rolling her eyes, her reddened face now drying. Then she sticks him with a particularly sharp and concerned look. “Are you gonna fall over, Uncle? You look like you’re gonna and I bet you’re heavy as fuck. I mean, I _lift,_ but don’t make me lift your ass when the bed’s right there. That’s rude, y’know.”

 Without further ado, Uzumaki Kushina takes his hand again and pushes him towards the curtained-off sleeping area. He goes, stumbling and uncertain, and lets her manhandle him into sitting on the covers of her bed. He flexes his tingling hand when she releases him to nimbly hop over her possessions towards the bookshelf.

 “Anyway, you should _totally_ hear about our last game we played,” Kushina recounts, yanking a massive binder off her bookshelf and practically skipping back across the room to dump it in his lap. “You gotta promise not to laugh or anything though, alright?”

 “Al…right.”

 “I mean, it’s pretty kiddy, but it’s _fun,_ y’know?” Kushina drops down onto the bed heavily, sitting closely beside him so she can open the binder and yank out several drawings of what are clearly different characters. “This is Princess Katsumi – named after my gran, y’know – she’s a super powerful sea witch on the run because her stupid family wants her to marry some childish demon fox lord. She’s got awesome magic powers, but she’s also a warrior powerhouse, y’know? Anyway, Mai made this _awesome_ story where all these demon assassins were being sent after us and it turned out that the demon lord had found Katsumi, so we had to go fight him and all his demon generals.”

 The drawings are… rough. Mostly doodles on the side of other papers, full of scribbles about the characters’ stories, but some earnest attempts at art by someone good with pen and ink but clearly unpracticed in drawing fantastic characters. There are a lot of drawings and stories, graphs and maps and more, in the styles of several different people, some neat and some haphazard but all done with plenty of imagination and care.

 Sakumo finds himself fascinated, half-listening to Kushina tell him a fantasy adventure worthy of teenagers play-acting their own story and half-pouring through the mounds of effort put into a game. He never did anything like this as a child. He and Ayame and Dai spent most of their time training or fighting, at most spinning ridiculous scenarios as infrequent jokes, or keeping different hobbies like gardening for Ayame or sewing for Dai. Sakumo used to interact with his summons more and had a deeper interest in blades and their history, when he was able to spare the energy.

 Kakashi never did anything like this. His son’s favorite hobby has always been reading, always keeping fairly quiet and self-contained. Never anything like the messy creation process Kushina is outlining here. Sometimes, when Kakashi was younger, Sakumo could get his son to share whatever he was reading, and listen for hours to Kakashi excitedly share the latest story he’d lost himself in.

 “Hey, Uncle? I can stop if this is boring for you. I mean, this is pretty silly.”

 Uzumaki Kushina’s voice is terribly small here. Her tone is good-humored and her embarrassed smile is wide, despite the leftover redness, but her toes are tapping with restlessness and she said it very quietly. Like her fun shouldn’t take up too much space.

 It’s almost morning. He can’t stay.

 He shouldn’t.

 “…No, no.” Sakumo says instead, over the awful whispers and the slowly approaching dawn. It’s still dark outside and the dawn might as well be weeks away. “Tell me about your friend’s priestess and how she figured out how to purify the demons. This is incredible.”

 Kushina’s expression, blotchy and so very young, brightens the whole room. The air is buzzing still, but lightly now, with something more than the grief that lingers.

 “It would be rude to begin a story and not finish it,” Sakumo says.

 “Y’know, Uncle, you’re right! That would be super rude. Here, this is Hana’s character, she’s a dancing assassin from the desert, who fell in love with a traveling poet she was supposed to kill who was actually a demon.”

 “Oh my.”

 “I know, right?” Kushina says excitedly.


	6. A Moment Without Everything

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Pause.

 Sakumo wakes up without truly doing so.

 He’s surrounded by warmth. His mind is floating in a haze of comfort, and the rest of him is wrapped in heavy softness. The only outlier are the unfamiliar – but not unpleasant, nor entirely unknown – smells. He’s not home, some part of him recognizes, but he’s not unsafe.

 He opens his eyes.

 There’s a strange ceiling, small and close. He blinks, slow and unthinking, and follows the glow of light across the ceiling to a window. There’s a curtain blocking out the rest of the room, but the window is visible past the fabric, its sill covered in seaside and ocean-related charms. A windchime hangs duly next to the closed frame, glinting with a brilliant, late morning sun somewhere out there in the wider world.

 He blinks, then he exhales. Sakumo doesn’t know how much time passes before he manages to open them again, nor does he truly notice or care. There’s a feeling here he barely remembers, returned and enthralling, as elusive and familiar as a memory from a dream.

 Sakumo manages to open his eyes again because the world is shifting.

 “Mmph,” insists a weight on his chest.

 Then, half-asleep order issued, the warm weight shifts and snuggles a nose deeper against his neck. It shifts again, making itself comfortable with a soft hum against his skin, and then somehow manages to inflict more weight on him with a shifting of hip and a brief kicking of legs. “Mmmhm.”

 It's not uncomfortable, rather the opposite. Warm. Comforting.

 “Mmhmmhm.”

 There is someone asleep on his chest, he might realize if he were properly awake. He recognizes it at least partially, as that someone also manages to pull fearsome warm, soft, and heavy blankets over their head. The edge of the blanket covers a good half of Sakumo’s face.

 The partial darkness it brings is nice. The smell has none of the familiarity of a den, no homely or familial scents, but it’s clean and without any strong perfumes. There is red everywhere and it is very bright. He closes his eyes.

 “Hrmnhm.”

 Someone is not so much using him as a pillow as they are using him as their bed.

 It can’t be Ayame, because she’s been dead for years. It can’t be Kakashi, because his son is smaller and lighter, and hasn’t deigned to do something as childish as nap with his father in far too long. It can’t be Dai, because Dai would be smothering him. It can’t be anyone else because Sakumo doesn’t have any other family and he hasn’t bothered to consider a sexually or romantically involved bedmate for a… nearly embarrassing amount of time. He doesn’t really do… flings. Never did.

 He doesn’t think through all this, though. He barely thinks at all. His eyesight is unfocused, his limbs are heavy, and there’s something like the echo of an ache in the back of his head.

 Sakumo isn’t entirely sure of his current place in the world. He could barely be called awake.

 Was there something he was going to do? Was there somewhere he needed to be? Surely nothing that needs him to do anything. There is nothing stopping him from closing his eyes – already closed – and breathing himself back into a full and sweet sleep.

 Things are good, now, or at least good enough. Things are uncomplicated and comfortable.

 The echo of unfinished business tugs at his mind, but cannot find a grip on the slipperiness of sleep. The murmur of danger and uncertainty pushes at him, but Sakumo’s past weeks have been a haze of drunkenness, dishonor, and grief. All his sleep has been restless, and in comparison, this feels true in a way that he has desperately needed. He is starved for what the warmth and comfort offer him, and all but drunk on it.

 He doesn’t feel broken. He doesn’t even notice that he doesn’t feel broken. Sakumo doesn’t think, nor knowingly feel or fear. He just is. He is. 

  _I am. I am. I am._

 Thoughtless, easy, comfortable existence. 

 And though he doesn’t know it well, or waking, he’s not alone.

 He doesn’t open his eyes again, too heavy, such soothing weight, and he breathes into the warmth and the dark, the dim light and the comfort. There is no grief, no pain, no mistakes, and no memory. At most there is the echo of something uncomfortable, but it and consciousness have no hold on him, and it is easily dismissed and ignored, despite any consequences that might arise later.

 There is no war. No wrong. There is nothing to begin, nor anything to end. It is temporary, some tired part of him knows, as he gorges himself on comfort and rest. But nothing is forever, and he will take this peace… this victory… this pause where he can have it.

 The world is quiet. Content.

 Sakumo lets go. 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This probably isn't going to end the way people might be expecting. This is more interlude/half-chapter, and should be swiftly followed by the next, which is mostly done. There's like one or two chapters left, at most.
> 
> EDIT: Okay, this note apparently worried people? Don't worry. It's gonna be fine. This was perhaps a poor way to say that the next chapter just took a bit of an odd twist in how the ending is carried out. All the tags still apply. _Happy ending_ , friends. _Happy ending._ No one's dying.


	7. Loud Shrieking in Three Voices

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one is the second-last chapter, then we're finally done. If anyone was scared by the end notes of the previous chapter, I stg that was not my intention. All I meant to say by saying "this might not end how people are expecting" is that "idk how to end this, so I'm going to bring in two characters in not-exactly-out-of-left-field-but-pretty-close." The world is a funny place and endings don't really happen. Life goes on, sometimes weirdly, but also sometimes looking up.

 Someone screeches at the top of their lungs and Sakumo’s eyes snap open. He didn’t even know he’d fallen asleep, but he must have been because his eyesight is blurred, his head is fogged, his limbs are stiff, and bright sunlight is streaming through a window. He’s awake now, though. 

 He’s in a bed, small but comfortable, and though he’s startled, he can’t sit up. There is someone lying on his chest, smaller than him and weighty, with a wealth of red hair that’s partially stuck to his face. Whoever they are, they are also extremely disgruntled, moving swiftly into angry. At least, the low groan that turns into a genuinely animalistic snarl is anything to go by.

 “Miko, what the _fuck?_ ” Uzumaki Kushina demands into Sakumo’s neck.

 Sakumo doesn’t know what to do. He is trained to be decisive and active in essentially every situation, but his brain has tripped and stumbled on: “You’ve just been caught in bed with a teenage princess. What the actual, genuine, sincere _fuck_ do you do now?” His mind, accordingly, is now flatly refusing to work. It’s gone on strike. It’s spontaneously combusted. It is stuck repeating that horrifying realization and unanswerable question.

 Beside the bed, fortunately, are two people who aren’t the Sandaime Hokage and Inuzuka Tsume. If the two people beside the bed were the Sandaime Hokage and Inuzuka Tsume – the absolute worst people that Sakumo’s malfunctioning mind can currently imagine witnessing this situation – there wouldn’t even have been time for the Sandaime Hokage to exile him to the bottom of the sea, because Inuzuka Tsume would already be biting into his torn-out heart. That is, if she didn’t aim much lower first.

 No, unfortunately, the two people standing next to Uzumaki Kushina’s bed are two more teenage girls, neither one wearing their hitai-ate but clearly kunoichi nonetheless. Sakumo can identify the horrified glare of an angry kunoichi at great distance. However, he can’t personally identify his future murderesses.

 The first girl is a dark-haired Uchiha, dressed plainly but well, and she’s not so much slender as she is just awkwardly skinny. She’s very delicately pretty, in a way that will be less babyish and far more elegant when she’s older, but her pale skin is greyed with horror and her dark eyes are alarmingly wide.

 The second girl isn’t obviously from a clan, and doesn’t look like she belongs to one. She’s tall and plump, in a way that will probably become burly when she’s old enough to develop solid muscles, and wearing heavy, well-done make-up and revealing clothes to bridge the gap. She has thick, frizzy brown hair, brown eyes, and warm peachy skin, and her drawn-on brows are currently very high while her wide mouth is very flat.

 “WHAT IS HAPPENING IN THIS DEN OF INIQUITY?” the Uchiha girl says.

 “It’s too early for this,” Kushina moans, curling tighter into her spot on Sakumo’s chest and tugging the blanket over her head again. The soft edge of the blanket curled in Kushina’s fist bumps carelessly into Sakumo’s jaw, probably hard enough to lay a lesser man flat. “Go _away._ ”

 Sakumo wants desperately to dislodge her, but he has the distinct feeling that laying his hands on his host will not end well for him. At all.

 The Uchiha girl looks ready to burst into righteous, horrified flame. In complete contradiction, the other girl has managed to overcome her surprise enough to look Sakumo up and down in a way that is… stickily piercing. (Lecherous. The word is lecherous, but Sakumo’s uncooperative mind will not think it.) A delighted grin is overtaking this non-clan girl’s face.

 “And stop calling my home that,” Kushina mumbles.

 “But it suits it so _well,_ ” the non-clan girl says cheerily. “Who’s the john?”

 The Uchiha girl’s brows furrow deeply as she looks at her companion, who ignores her and stares with very sharp, wide cheer towards Sakumo. Sakumo would answer her, but he’s trying not to think too deeply about that use of slang or its implications. He’s just woken up, his brain promptly got stuck on being caught in this awful situation, and these are not the people he expected an Uzumaki jinchuuriki princess to keep company with.

 He doesn’t know what he was expecting, honestly. He has no room to judge odd friends.

 Kushina stirs and flops over to face her friends, peering very blearily out from her blanket cocoon. It must be around noon now, if not one or two hours past. Sakumo has only very vague memories of the clock in the kitchen, which unlike the sunlight he can’t see from this angle, reaching at least five in the morning. He has vaguer memories still of the grey of dawn creeping up, but those have the flavor of potentially made-up memories.

 “Who?” Kushina mumbles confusedly.

 “The john you’re making yourself comfortable on right now,” the non-clan girl says. (Leers.)

 Kushina stares confusedly at her friend, then goes tense. She warily pats the chest underneath her head, finally hearing a panicked heartbeat. Then she slowly looks up at Sakumo, her skin shade by shade turning the same color as her hair, and stares at him in horrified realization. He can see it in her wide eyes, she’s just now noticing the situation in which she’s been caught. 

 With a deafening screech, the room explodes into motion. Kushina sits bolt upright, an elbow jamming into Sakumo’s gut as she snatches a pillow out from under him with her right hand, yanking the blankets off her with her left. She (still screeching, it’s one very loud, ongoing screech) whips the pillow into the Uchiha girl’s face and launches at the non-clan girl with the blankets. The Uchiha girl goes down, tripping backwards into a basket of folded laundry, and Kushina and her blanket-turned-net roll over the floor with the other girl, yelling and struggling for dominance.

 All Sakumo can do is wheeze, still exhausted and achy, still shocked out of his wits and now elbowed out of his breath. He’d be wondering if he was actually deafened, if not for how he can still very much hear the shouting of the three teenage kunoichi.

 “YOU DIDN’T SEE SHIT,” Kushina yells at the other girl trying and failing to pin her, and effortlessly flips them despite how the size difference should give her a massive disadvantage. Her face has the complexion of a tomato and her bedhead is nothing short of spectacular.

 Her opponent makes a high-pitched, shrieking cackle sound of victory, despite the fact that Kushina is on top. “BITCH, I’LL REMEMBER THIS ON MY DEATHBED!” She dodges a punch to the face from Kushina and flips them again, kicking the blankets clear on top of a bookshelf. “THE FUCK DID YOU _DO_ LAST NIGHT? _WHO_ THE FUCK’D-?”

 “YOU BREATHE A FUCKING WORD OF THIS, MAI, AND I’LL EAT YOUR FACE, Y’KNOW I WILL.”

 “I’LL TELL THE WORLD, YOU CAN’T STOP ME!”

 “YOU EAT THAT MUCH CONCEALER AND YOU’LL MAKE YOURSELF SICK,” the Uchiha girl shouts at Kushina. 

 She's struggling to free herself from the laundry basket. It’s a tall basket and she’d fallen in butt-first, and that’s awkward no matter how skinny a person is. She’s her own shade of pinkish red, either from anger or embarrassment, and shakes the pillow she’d been hit with a dainty fist.

 “I’LL PUKE BACK UP ON YOUR CORPSE!” Kushina screams back, while struggling in a headlock.

 “YOU SICK-” the Uchiha girl chokes on her own indignance. “HOW DARE YOU HIT ME WHEN WE’RE ONLY CONCERNED FOR YOU.”

 The Uchiha girl, still stuck in the basket, whips the pillow she’d been struck with across the room, where Kushina has slipped the headlock and grabbed her opponent by the waist. Kushina turns the non-clan girl around at the right second to get struck in the face with the pillow. Kushina then immediately grabs this new weapon and begins smothering the other girl with it, who was laughing at the both of them.

 This other girl, Kushina’s future victim of murder, Sakumo believes may be the infamous Mai, the best friend who allegedly once pushed Kushina out a window and directs the stories of their friend group’s _Super Ninja Adventures_ not-even-remotely-shogi games.

 All of Sakumo’s self-preservation instincts are yelling at him to make a swift exit through the door or window, but they’re rather drowned out by the cacophony in front of him. He’s unfairly fascinated, transfixed by horror and sweet nostalgia. It’s like watching Ayame interact with her own best female friends all those years ago, especially her Inuzuka friends, except less violent (presumably out of respect for Kushina’s home) and not quite as simultaneously affectionate. Also, no one’s drunk.

 “I KNEW WE SHOULDN’T HAVE LEFT YOU ALONE LAST NIGHT,” the Uchiha girl says, finally struggling her way out of the basket. It requires toppling the basket over and shuffling out like a hermit crab. “WE LEAVE YOU ALONE AND LOOK-” She waves an outraged arm at Sakumo, still sitting uncertainly on the bed, all while she’s furiously fixing the basket and refolding a sweater. “-WHAT HAPPENS!”

 While the Uchiha girl is yelling, Mai knees Kushina in the back, then tosses the released pillow she was being smothered with on top of the bookshelf with the blankets and spectacular aim.

 “Oh, believe me, I’m _looking!_ ” Mai says, and grins toothily at Kushina while fending off an earnest attempt to scratch her eyeballs out. “ _Nice,_ bitch. So, you go for _mature_ guys now?”

 “SHUT THE FUCK UP, MAI, SO I CAN KILL YOU.”

 Sakumo warily makes to stand up, perhaps to intervene, because this is still pretty tame but he _is_ the adult in the room. He hardly wants it to escalate to murder or cannibalism on his account. However, trying to stand up makes the Uchiha girl glare at him so hatefully that it’s a miracle that he doesn’t spontaneously burst into flames. Which is a very real concern with an Uchiha.

 The Uchiha girl whirls on the two others, still wrestling on the floor. “THIS IS EXACTLY THE SORT OF BEHAVIOR I WAS WORRIED ABOUT! IN YOUR GRIEF, YOU _THREW_ YOURSELF INTO THE ARMS OF THE NEAREST LICENTIOUS MASQUERADER LIKE A WANTON LIBERTINE.”

 Kushina pauses in trying to bite chunks out of Mai’s arm and looks at the Uchiha girl with a scowl. “I dunno what the hell that’s supposed to mean. Use real words, y’know?”

 Mai cackles. “Yeah, Miko, try some along the lines of _four-letters-_ ”

 Kushina bares her teeth down at her victim and growls.

 The Uchiha girl throws up her hands in frustration. “If you _wanted_ to have some ‘one night, random, spontaneous hook-up’-” This phrase is said with finger-quotes and a number of failings in Sakumo’s general direction. “-to exorcize your emotions, we could have _planned_ one for you!”

 Kushina, sitting on top of Mai’s back, just stares, unimpressed and disbelieving. Mai, from her position as Kushina’s new soon-to-be-skinned rug, sputters with laughter.

 “What?” Mai says. _“WHAT?”_

 Prompted by Mai’s gasps and giggles, Kushina snorts. “Miko, I’m pretty sure that’s not how it works, y’know,” she says, still red-faced but now more bemused than murderous. “Like, not at all. Like, _not at all,_ y’know? And that’s not what happened, so shut the fuck up.”

 The Uchiha girl, Miko, sucks in a breath like she’s about to spit fire, but it’s Mai who gets there first.

 “Ooh, so how long _has_ this ‘licentious and wanton affair’ been going on, then?”

 Kushina stares down at the girl who is, in her own words: “the best friend a bitch could ask for, y’know.” Also, who is currently her seat, pinned to the floor with her wrists behind her back.

 “Y’know what, Mai? Fuck you.”

 “Nice. I gotta say: I _like_ this new, raunchy side of you, Kushi.”

 “You would,” Kushina spits. “I didn’t sleep with him!”

 Miko the Uchiha girl crosses her arms. “Eye-witness testimony will prove otherwise.”

 At the same time, Mai says, “Oh, so you two were awake _all night._ Gotcha.”

 Kushina had been turning less red, but she immediately turns the color of a tomato again. She looks between her friends – Sakumo must assume that they are her friends, if he’s guessed their identities correctly, since she did refer to them as her friends – as though she’s torn between which one of them to kill for knowing too much first. It’s been years, but Sakumo recognizes it.

 Mai pulls her hands off her back and puts them under her chin. “So, who’s the john?”

 Kushina raises her hands, which _were_ pinning her friend’s wrists down but are now tied together with thin wire. She scowls at the binding and snaps it apart easily.

 “This _uncle_ is Hatake Sakumo and _nothing happened._ ”

 “Hatake, huh?” Mai says, with the tone and expression of someone who knew who the “john” was all along. She looks up at Sakumo through long, presumably fake eyelashes and says plainly, “Yo. Saito Mai, chuunin, clanless, occasional lady of the night. Nice to meet you, sir. Heard you got some moves.”

 Sakumo chokes on his own introduction, once all that registers. Kushina promptly thwaps her friend on the top of the head, which makes Mai curse, and Miko scowls at them both. The Uchiha girl looks back at Sakumo warily, like she’s trying to size him up next to all the whispers she must have heard.

  _Oh._

 “Uchiha Mikoto, jounin,” the Uchiha girl says, nodding with prim determination. Politeness without any warmth. Respect without any trust. “A pleasure, Hatake-san.”

  _Oh. It’s morning._

 He’s hardly caught up on clan politics of late, but Sakumo thinks he may be looking at the betrothed of the future Uchiha Clan Head, a girl who is the next best thing to Konoha royalty next to the Senju and the Hokage. Last he’d checked, the Uchiha and the Senju-Uzumaki didn’t mix. Then again, last he’d checked, he hadn’t known anything about Uzumaki Kushina, who appears to kidnap unlikely friends without much regard for tradition or socially-approved behavior.

  _I was supposed to have killed myself by now,_ he doesn’t say.

 “The pleasure is mine, Uchiha-san, Saito-san,” he says instead, with a stiff nod.

 “I bet it was.”

 “I’ll fucking kill you, Mai.”

 “No murder yet!” Mikoto snaps. “Something happened! Whether or not anything… untoward… happened, this is completely inappropriate behavior! You can’t just… spontaneously invite a _strange_ man into your home and _sleep with him!_ What if people find out? What if your-?”

 “Grauntie doesn’t give a shit and neither will anyone else if they know what’s good for ‘em,” Kushina interrupts hotly, settling herself more comfortably on Mai’s back. “So long as you don’t snitch, bitch, no one’s gonna know, _right?_ ”

 Mikoto glares. “Strange talk from a big-mouthed _vixen._ ”

 “Ooooh,” Mai says.

 Kushina thwaps at Mai again, still glaring at Mikoto, then sticks out her tongue defiantly. Mikoto’s expression suggests that Kushina made well have made the most obscene and offensive of hand gestures, either that or Kushina’s going to shortly be short a tongue.

 “Bite me,” Kushina says.

 Mikoto scoffs. “I would but I have taste.” 

 If this continues any more, Sakumo is going to start having flashbacks to his late wife and her Inuzuka friends. The part of him that notes this has to admit, however, that it’s good to see that kunoichi don’t really change all that much. Give these girls a few more years and he’s sure they’ll be drinking all their hapless suitors under the table, getting kicked out of all-you-can-eat restaurants on someone else’s wallet, and breaking hearts left and right, also their body armor when they flex too hard.

 That is, if they all live that long, given the war that’s broken out on his mistake.

 “Your Grauntie’s probably going to love this,” Mai says consideringly. “She’s always after you to meet boys, Kushi. Or girls. I think she’s trying to live a vicarious sex life through you. She’ll be so disappointed to hear ‘nothing happened.’”

 “She’s not that old, y’know,” Kushina says, rolling her eyes. “She can go have her own vicarious sex life or whatever.” Kushina is still red in the face, but now she look at Sakumo shrewdly. “Y’know, Uncle, better keep an eye out, or she’ll start planning the wedding before lunch today.”

 “It’s one in the afternoon,” Mikoto says.

 “Before dinner then. Whatever. Ain’t happening. Sorry, Uncle.”

 Sakumo coughs on what might be a laugh, hoarse and startled. “I’ll recover somehow,” he says wryly. “I’m far too old and uninteresting for a lovely lady such as yourself anyway.”

 It’s not even morning. He missed the morning.

 He _missed_ the morning. 

 Mai grins approvingly at him. “So, how’d you end up in Kushina’s bed doing _nothing,_ sir?”

 He fell asleep. _He fell asleep._

 How in the world did he just _fall asleep?_

 “Stoppit,” Kushina orders hotly. She finally gets to her feet and glares between Mai and Mikoto, puffing herself up for emphasis. “I met him in the graveyard at two in the morning and invited him over for a meal, y’know? All he did was eat my food, tidy my shoes, tell bad jokes, and be super nice while I made his ears bleed from telling him all about the _An Engagement with Demons_ campaign!”

 Just a little longer, he’d told himself. He couldn’t leave Kushina as she was. Morning was so soon, but long enough away that he could just stay a little longer. For a teenage girl who’d lost everything, he could make a little more time to stay. Morning, he’d lied to himself, wasn’t going anywhere.

 “Oh, that was a good once,” Mai says. “Also, yeah, that’s not weird.”

 Now he’s missed morning.

 What in the world is he supposed to do now?

 “I’m weird?! I was being friendly, y’know? It’s you Konoha and Fire people who are weird about this stuff!” Kushina insists loudly, in the voice of a very old, stubbornly unsolved argument. “Y’know, it’s like you people’ve never heard of being neighborly!”

 “Country giiirl,” Mai says teasingly.

 Kushina lifts her nose into the air and sniffs. “You’re all just rude.”

 “What were you doing in the graveyard at two in the morning?” Mikoto says suspiciously, looking between Kushina and Sakumo as though she’ll be able to catch them hiding ulterior motives behind their backs. Mostly Sakumo, though she clearly asks the question of Kushina.

  _Saying last goodbyes,_ Sakumo doesn’t answer.

 “None of your business what Uncle was doing,” Kushina says. “That’s so rude, y’know, Miko.”

 Mikoto’s lips thin. “Mai, get off the floor, for heaven’s sake.”

 Mai shrugs and pulls herself up off the floor. “So,” she drawls, tilting her hips and surveying the scene like a toad in a room full of bugs. “Let me get this straight. You invited the _White Fang_ over for a meal after running into him for the first time, in a graveyard at two in the morning, and then he stayed over talking about fantasy stuff until you fell asleep on him? That’s so you, Kushi.”

 “Yeah, and breaking into my _house_ is just so you, too, y’know, Mai? Why’re you even here?”

 “We came to check on you,” Mikoto says slowly. “We were _concerned._ ”

 “Well, you shouldn’t be,” Kushina says dismissively. The red in her face persists damningly, even as she continues speaking as though she’s never cried in her life and definitely didn’t break down into tears on multiple occasions throughout the night. “I’m finer than fine. Greater than great. There’s the door, bye. Thanks for coming around.”

 “Wow, rude,” Mai says.

 This leaves Sakumo in a… very awkward situation.

 Not just because he’s been caught in the bed of the Uzumaki princess by her friends, one of whom is a high-ranking Uchiha and the other of whom just winked playfully at him. Even though this is entirely platonic, it’s still incredibly awkward, possibly singularly more so than all Sakumo’s own teenage adventures combined. Which is saying something, considering that this appears to be more or less par the course for Uzumaki Kushina. The saying is apparently true, kunoichis really do have more fun.

 No, this situation is awkward partly because he was very determined to kill himself and he has… no idea what to do now. Given everything that’s happened, it seems… strange. The whispers are furious with him and his utter lack of honor and duty, but everything just looks so… different… in the daylight. He can picture just going home and going through with it, just… all the reasons why don’t come nearly so easily, and reasons why not seem more important than they were.

 Kushina would be hurt if he went home and killed himself now. He barely knows her at all, but… she’d care. She has her friends here, breaking into her house to check on her and her grief, and he’s all but a stranger, but she’d care… and he’d be at fault for more tears from her.

 She’s not the only one.

  _Kakashi._

 His son hates him, but…

 Kakashi’s already a shinobi, already strong, but…

 He’s so young.

 He’s so _young._

 It should be Sakumo out on those battlefields, first, before any of these children, at the very least. The village will never trust him with anything of importance again, but it should be him in front of his son, who is far too small to go to war. It should be him front of these girls, who are unfinished and not yet grown for all they play at being so. What will disappearing in shame do for these children, who will soon be put to war instead of playing games and reading books and being friends? Who don’t care what fatal mistakes he’s made in his duty but that he’s _nice_ and listens to their stories and woes? What protection will a dead man be? What kindness and guidance can a dead man give?

 What is he thinking? This is mad. He can’t even keep his own promises. For all his determination and surety last night, taking a sword to himself just seems… He can’t quite justify why. Not rightly. _How could anyone hope for protection from so fickle a man?_

 “You don’t have to be fine,” Mikoto insists, trying and failing to stare Kushina’s bravado down. “We’re not testing you. The point of checking if you’re okay is so we can help you if you’re _not._ ”

 “Well, I’m great,” Kushina says.

 “Yes, inviting unknown men you meet in graveyards into your home illustrates that,” Mikoto says dryly.

 “Rude. Uncle and I had a great time!”

 Mai pokes at one of the _Super Ninja Adventure_ folders, stacked neatly on the floor, with her toe. “Yeah,” she says, appearing really consider it without any goal of teasing. “Looks like the two of you had a pretty good time. What’d you think of our game, sir?”

 “Incredibly creative,” Sakumo answers honestly, smiling at them with all the gentle encouragement he can’t quite muster for himself, “and well-planned in terms of story and play.”

 Kushina all but beams, the last of her blush settling down. Mai grins at him, wide and delighted, making her look more like the plump teenager she is instead of a “lady of the night.” Something about her looks almost familiar, especially standing between the Uzumaki princess and an Uchiha lady, but he can’t quite place it with all that heavy make-up.

 “Cool. My mom helped us set it up,” Mai says proudly, before she remembers herself and winks salaciously at Sakumo again. “When she wasn’t busy with the old-fashioned way of showing a guy a good time, of course.”

 “He’s gonna come around for a game sometime!” Kushina tells Mikoto, with great enthusiasm, even though Sakumo is fairly certain he never agreed to do any such thing. “You’d like him. He has really practical solutions to stuff, y’know, even if his jokes are bad. He has a kiddo too. So, I was thinking we could invite some of your and Hanako’s cousins, right, and have a really big game? Or just teach more people how to play? I mean, Namikaze needs someone at his level, right?”

 “Wow, such concern for the guy,” Mai says. “It’s true, though, we could really use more test subjects, and Mom’d probably love to have another adult around. We can do the community a favor at the same time, right? Give some of those kids better hobbies than Hanako’s Mori weirdness or becoming the usual Uchiha pyromaniacs.”

 Mikoto appears to seriously think this over. “Well, between him and Taiki, Tsume’s going to snap eventually,” she allows, giving Sakumo one last suspicious look. “It’s not a _bad_ idea. I _suppose_ we could organize something by Friday.”

 Kushina smiles brightly. “Great! Anyway, on the subject, Miko, you still owe me a mop from one of our games last month, y’know, I remembered last night.”

 “I’m not buying you a mop to replace the one _you_ broke.”

 “Yes, you are,” Kushina says insistently. “Also, lunch, for breaking into my place. I’m hungry.”

 “When are you not hungry? No. You already ate my money.”

 Kushina turns on Mai, who immediately turns to Sakumo and says with blunt cheerfulness, “Hey, Hatake-san, you should treat us to lunch. For giving me and Miko heart attacks and stuff.”

 “Mai, don’t make Uncle pay for our meals,” Kushina says, frowning.

 “Nah, we can explain all the rules of the game to him properly. I bet you left a whole bunch of stuff out. I run the game, right? _I_ know what I’m talking about and don’t rely on supernatural luck with dice.”

 “No, you just rig them,” Mikoto mutters.

 Kushina's friend continues, as though she browbeats traitors to Konoha into paying for her and her friends’ lunches on a regular basis. “Do not and you can’t prove anything. Come on, he’s a high-ranking jounin and clan, and you cooked for him, right? He can pay you back for the meal. Least he can do.”

 “Why’s he feeding you if he’s paying me back?”

 “Because he gave me a heart attack not even half-an-hour ago. I feel faint now. Need to eat.”

 “That makes no sense,” Mikoto says.

 Mai shrugs. “Sure it does. Nearly killed me, but food solves everything. Right, Kushi?”

 Kushina looks very much like she wants to continue arguing with her friend, but is also physically incapable of denying the statement that food solves everything. Sakumo remembers her making some statement earlier about there being nothing in the world that a “really good bowl of ramen” couldn’t fix.

 He should really detach himself from this, but… he does owe Kushina a meal.

 “What about it, Hatake-san? Lunch?” Mai says.

  _No, thank you, I need to go home and finish killing myself,_ he doesn’t say, because that’s absurd.

 “Of course,” he says instead, because that’s somehow less absurd. “My treat.”

 “ _Nice,_ ” Mai says.

 “Well, if you’re really okay with it, Uncle,” Kushina says.

 He’s not okay with a lot of things, like the whispers of broken promises and uncertain futures and duty and honor, but he can be okay with this. Everything looks so different in the afternoon light, though nothing’s really changed. There’s the possibility of bringing shame down on anyone he’s seen with, but all three girls are staring at him very earnestly, no mention of the gossip they all must have heard dozens of times. They really don’t seem to care, and he owes an Uzumaki princess a meal.

 That’ll have to be his honor today. He doesn’t know what else to do.

 “Sure,” he says, slowly standing “Where to?” 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter and the following were originally one chapter, but it got waaaay too long. Chop! (The next chapter is finished, btw, so it should be appearing soon, within the next couple hours or so.) Yes, Mikoto is Sasuke and Itachi's mom. Mai is an OC, who makes an appearance in style in the 5th installment of [my Team Seven vs. Paperwork series.](http://archiveofourown.org/series/376589) This fic contains more than a few references to that series. It can more or less be assumed that all my Naruto fics exist in the same base universe. 
> 
> EDIT: Since there is some confusion, I must elaborate that by "same base universe" I don't mean that all my fics are compliant with each other. This fic is absolutely fix-it and canon divergence, both from actual canon and from the cracked canon of the ridiculous T7vPaperwork AU. "What A Big Heart You Have" is its own AU with an unknown future ahead of it. What I mean is: the same OCs exist across my fics and, though no paperwork shenanigans are going on here, it can be gently assumed that the worldbuilding setups are similar: like that Mai (OC) is trouble, Taiki (OC) writes terrible poetry, and that Tsume and Kushina's friendship is terrifying.


	8. Squeak Against The Roar

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The faint feelings of epilogue are stirring.

 And it’s clear he’s already made his first mistake with that general question, because he gets three different answers at the same time. He blinks at the three girls in front of him, uncertain, and thinks _shit._ Kushina, Mai, and Mikoto all turn on each other not unlike savage beasts.

 “We’re not going _there_ again!”

 “We’re not going to that snooty place near the Uchiha Compound!”

 “If anyone makes me eat seafood, I’m not gonna miss.”

 At the same time, Kushina, Mai, and Mikoto make their way towards the door in a surprisingly organized fashion for the fact they’re arguing loudly the entire way. Kushina pulls on her shoes like she’s threatening someone’s life. Then she tosses Sakumo’s to him before getting in Mai’s face and outlining exactly why seafood is amazing (even if “Konoha does it wrong”) and why Mai is a “fucking wimp.”

 Then Kushina puts her hand on the door and, interrupting herself, says, “Wait, quiet in the hallway. The wards aren’t gonna catch any yelling.” Then she opens the door and, while ushering them all into the hallway, says in hushed whispers, “Miko, can you for once in your life pick a place that doesn’t have a formal dress code, y’know?”

 “Excuse me,” Mikoto hisses. “There’s only _so many times_ a person can eat ramen.”

 “Ooooh.”

 “Fuck off, Mai.”

 Kushina locks her door behind them, then grabs Sakumo by the arm and hooks her other arm around Mai’s. Walking down the small hallway is not unlike one of those three-legged races in the obstacle courses that the Academy sometimes runs: potentially fatal and largely unwilling. Kushina clings heavily to his limb like she’s one mood-change away from performing some sort of body-slam, dragging him down the hall even though he’s perfectly willing to walk on his own.

 Listening to the bickering is no real trouble though. It’s nostalgic, almost, in its way.

 Since Mikoto has declined to walk anywhere near Mai, Sakumo decides he may as well offer her his free arm. It’s only polite. Mikoto looks suspiciously up at him, then takes his arm with great poise, and informs her friends that they have no palate for fine food.

 Getting down the stairs is nothing less than a near-death experience. By the end of this near-death experience, however, Sakumo has learned that the Uzumaki princess once accidentally snorted spicy soup out of her nose at Konoha’s oldest restaurant, the Uchiha girl regularly gives herself “brain-freeze” from green tea ice-cream, and that Mai once threw up at a buffet because she ate too much of something she knew made her sick and still unconcernedly went back for two more plates afterwards. It's an interesting trade-off. It’s not really information he ever cared to know, much less nearly fall down several flights of stairs to obtain, but he’s neither given a choice in receiving the information nor at what volume.  

 By the time they exit Kushina’s apartment building, Kushina and Mai have turned on Mikoto together, and formally agreed to find the greasiest deep-fried food in Konoha and feed it to Mikoto. This is where Sakumo steps in to keep himself from being caught in the middle of bloodshed. He suggests that Kushina pick the restaurant because she’s the one he’s repaying, just… maybe a restaurant that serves food that everyone can enjoy and will not make people be sick on other members of their party.

  _I’m supposed to be dead,_ Sakumo thinks, as Kushina agrees with much grumbling that _maybe_ they can go to this “alright sit-down barbecue place that we haven’t yet been banned from.” The girls set off, dragging Sakumo along, and he listens to everything they have to say very intently – someone should and the girls all have interesting things to say – and thinks to himself, _I was supposed to be dead right now, but I’m not. I just… kept going. What now? What now?_

 He was really going to kill himself. He still could.

_But why? But why?_

 People stop and stare, here and there, but Uchiha Mikoto walks with her head held high and it’s hard to hear any whispers when Uzumaki Kushina and Saito Mai are so very, _very_ loud. He’s doing them no favors by being seen with them, but Kushina all but has _claws_ in his arm as she chatters at Mai and Mikoto is holding the other with ladylike confidence and a serene smile that dares anyone to tell her what to do or who to be seen with. She’s friends with Kushina, after all.

 It’s almost like… it’s almost like old times again. These are children and he can’t and won’t rely on them for support, but… there’s friendly affection and laughter and determination to carve out something for themselves and run as far as they can with it. It’s familiar, and it’s new, and it’s as bright as much as it feels a lie to involve himself in it again. He doesn’t listen to the whispers, as cruel as it might be to prolong any acquaintance when the future is so unknown. He doesn’t want to ruin this for them, but he doesn’t know what he’s doing.

 Some part of this feels like a very strange dream still.

 The strangeness continues through the streets, where life has continued and is continuing without any real mind to Sakumo not being dead. No one has any idea of what nearly happened last night. Not even Kushina really knows, busy heartedly assuring him that he’ll like the restaurant she picked.

 For every hateful stare or bewildered scowl he gets, there’s plenty of people who pass their group without a second glance. People pass without paying him any attention at all, too busy with their groceries or their lunch break or their own lives. For every person who squints confusedly at their group and recognizes him, there’s plenty of people who don’t have the time or the patience or just can’t quite place him. The village is worried, in some cases scared or grieving, but daily lives must go on regardless of looming conflict or the man who failed in his duty and released disaster on them all.

 In the middle of Mai talking about something, Kushina makes an excited noise and releases Sakumo’s arm to grab Mikoto’s off his other arm, then drags both her friends (“Sorry, Uncle! Just a minute!”) to press their noses against the window of a clothing store advertising dresses with pockets. Sakumo is left standing behind them, at once bemused and too conscious of being in his own skin.

 “Oh my god, it’s so cute, I’d die for that dress.”

 “Well, I’d kill for it.”

 “That sounds like a recipe for disaster, y’know, but I know, right?” 

 He can feel his own heartbeat, steady, ongoing. He can feel the way his breath moves his lungs, the way air swells in his chest, up and down. His mouth tastes foul and his hands feel dry and his limbs feel stiff. He could stand to eat, but just a glass of water for his parched throat would be appreciated.

 All that would have ended, if he’d made it to the morning. Still could.

 The sound of running has Sakumo looking up from his own hands, but something collides with his middle before he can consider moving out of the way. Thin arms go around his waist and squeeze tightly. Someone barely the height of his middle, with a shock of silver hair, buries their face against him with no apparent intention to ever let go again.

 Sakumo stares down, wide-eyed. “K-Kakashi?” 

 They’re in the middle of the street and his son has barely spoken to him since his return. Kakashi unofficially all but moved out of the house even. However, here, all his son down is shake his head slightly and squeeze Sakumo even tighter.

 Warily, gently, Sakumo puts his hands on his son’s shoulders. “Kakashi, what happened?”

 It takes several seconds before Kakashi pulls his face away and looks up, masked of course. Sakumo’s not half-bad at reading his son by now though. Kakashi’s eyes look panicked, embarrassed, and he hasn’t really moved away, keeping a death grip on Sakumo’s shirt with both hands.

 “Kakashi?” Sakumo prompts.

 “The house was clean.”

 “…What?”

 A pinched look appears around Kakashi’s eyes and he doesn’t repeat himself. Sakumo stares back at his son, confused and still stunned at the fact that Kakashi is talking to him at all. He’d been certain that Kakashi was never going to look at him again if he could help it. Kakashi is _hugging_ him in public because Sakumo recently cleaned the house?

 “You were gone,” Kakashi says quietly.

 That still doesn’t…

 Oh.

  _Oh, no._

 Sakumo still doesn’t understand exactly what has prompted this behavior from Kakashi, but it’s hellish to realize that Kakashi _went back to the house._ His son came _home._ Sakumo’s son came home and if Sakumo had met morning like he’d promised, Kakashi would have seen… _oh, god._ Just the thought of it is nearly enough to make Sakumo sick. He can’t even follow the thought through, his chest is too tight.

 As soon as he gets a moment out of sight, he’s going to be sick.

 Kakashi looks up at him with no idea what nearly happened and Sakumo doesn’t know whether to cry or just stare numbly. Kakashi came home to a clean and empty house – a sudden, marked difference from the past weeks, with no sign of his father. What must he have thought happened?

  _What nearly did?_

 “I’m here,” Sakumo says, patting Kakashi carefully on the shoulder, the tremble in his fingers isn’t as easily disguised as the tremble in his voice. “I didn’t go anywhere.”

  _But it was so close. It’s still close._

 Very gingerly, Kakashi relinquishes his death grip on Sakumo’s shirt. Not entirely though, he keeps one hand holding the edges of Sakumo’s shirt, even as the panic in his eyes dissolves into embarrassment for having panicked. Kakashi looks towards the shop they’re next to and the three teenage girls there.

 “Who are they?” Kakashi says.

 Sakumo follows Kakashi’s gaze, where the girls are silently watching their interaction. It’s Kushina who steps forward, while Mai crosses her arms and Mikoto glares at some few curious bystanders.

 “Uzumaki Kushina. I invited your old man over for dinner a while ago, y’know, so now he’s treating me and my friends to lunch.” Kushina puts her hands on her hips and leans over Kakashi with an inspecting eye. At her height, there can’t be many people she gets to loom over, she seems almost gleeful about it here. “What’s your name, pipsqueak?”

 Kakashi stares up at her, unimpressed. “Hatake Kakashi,” he answers. “Tomato-head.”

 Sakumo is still reeling, and yet still has to resist the urge to drag a hand over his face. He’s fairly certain that his son knows exactly who Kushina is and yet Kakashi still said _that._ Kushina stares down at his son, disbelieving, cheeks flushing with fury. Mikoto giggles behind one hand and Mai throws back her head and cackles.

 “Ooooh, puppy’s got _you,_ Kushi,” Mai says.

 Kushina glares at her friend, then back at Kakashi. “Big words coming from a _mop-head_ pipsqueak.”

 “Kushina,” Mikoto says. “Kushina, you’re trying to pick a fight with a _kid._ ”

 Kakashi’s grip tightens on Sakumo’s shirt and he says, in a voice that will probably sound more disinterested and less tetchy when he’s older, “Isn’t pipsqueak hypocritical for you?”

 Mai laughs, then murmurs, “And already losing.”

 “Kakashi,” Sakumo says.

 Kakashi looks blankly at his father. “She started it.”

 “I’m ending it,” Sakumo says gently, squeezing Kakashi’s shoulder, with a sidelong glance at Kushina.

 Kushina huffs and backs off to whispered ribbing from her friends. Insisting in hushed and furious tones that she’s not that short doesn’t seem to be going well for her, considering that both of her friends are quite a bit taller than she is and more than happy to point out that Kushina isn’t _that much_ taller than an eight-year-old boy.

 Sakumo bends down slightly, so he can better look Kakashi in the eye. “I’m sorry for-”

  _Everything,_ he doesn’t say, because that single word isn’t enough and there’s just too much.

  _What nearly happened,_ he doesn’t say, because he can’t even think it.

  _Dear god, what nearly happened._

 “-not leaving a note,” he finishes awkwardly, instead. When this doesn’t seem to provoke any response from his son, he continues, apparently accumulating awkwardness as he speaks, “Was there something you needed from me? Is there anything I can do for you?”

 He can’t really imagine any other reason for Kakashi to come back to the house. Even that’s a stretch, since Kakashi often goes out of his way not to need his father for anything.

 “No,” Kakashi says quietly.

 Neither of them say anything, for several seconds, letting the murmur of the street come between them. Kakashi’s grip is slipping, slowly, from Sakumo’s shirt.

 “Hey, Pipsqueak, you busy?” Kushina says.

 Kakashi looks at her, his fingernails still caught on Sakumo’s hem.

 “Maybe,” he says.

 “Great, then you should come with us, y’know?” Kushina says brightly. “You’re too small.”

 “I’m an average size for my age,” Kakashi answers, the _unlike you_ smacking pointedly unsaid against Kushina’s face. He looks up at his father questioningly, completely oblivious to the way Sakumo’s heart is swooping in hope against all facts.

 “You don’t have to come if you don’t want to,” Sakumo assures him.

 Kushina makes a loud, dismissive sound. “Don’t listen to your old man, Pipsqueak. That wasn’t a request, y’know? You’re joining us so we can explain the rules of the game, since you and the old man are coming around on Friday and all. I can already tell you’re one of those guys who needs everything explained to you twice, y’know.”

 “I’m not,” Kakashi insists, eyes narrowed. He tugs on Sakumo’s shirt. “What game?”

 “It’s like a choose-your-own-story fantasy adventure game with roleplaying,” Sakumo says.

 This is the best way he can on-the-spot summarize the lengthy and convoluted explanation that Kushina gave him. The explanation was very earnest, but he managed to pick up a better understanding of how the game worked once she actually got into the story and her retelling of them playing through it. There are still several elements that he’s not entirely sure of, systems that he doesn’t understand or doesn’t have all the details for, but the gist of it is simple enough. It seems to rely more on imagination and improvisation than anything else.

 Kakashi likes fiction quite a bit. He might like it.

 “You probably won’t even like it,” Kushina says. “It has math. Right, Mai?”

 “Oh yeah,” Mai says, nodding wisely. “So much math and statistics and stuff. This kid is way too young.”

 Sakumo is fairly certain the game doesn’t go far past very basic addition and subtraction unless a player chooses otherwise, but he doesn’t call them out on it. Nor does he bother pointing out Kakashi’s hitai-ate, which is clearly visible on his forehead and would have required the abilities to do basic math and judge chance to earn. Mikoto has a hand over her mouth that is clearly hiding a small smile.

 “I can do math,” Kakashi says insistently.

 “If you say so,” Kushina says, very skeptically. “Come on, Uncle, let’s go eat already.” Then she marches up to Sakumo again and takes Kakashi by the hand, who makes a sound he will later insist was not a squeak of surprise. “I’m so hungry I could eat a whale, y’know? What d’you like to eat, Pipsqueak? I warn you, if you say a word against seafood, we’re gonna have some issues.”

 Kakashi lets go of Sakumo’s shirt to grab him urgently by the hand, tugging his father along as Kushina begins to pull him along. He pulls back from Kushina’s grip, using his father as an anchor. Sakumo recognizes this for what it is and steps forward and lay a hand on where Kushina has grabbed his son, which inspires her to stop talking, stop moving, and look back at him. Sakumo gently detaches Kushina’s hand from Kakashi’s, taking her hand in his own instead.

 “Kakashi’s not comfortable with unsolicited touch,” Sakumo explains, giving his son the option to release their own joined hands if he so chooses, and Kushina as well. It’s awkward to explain sometimes, but people either get it or Sakumo discontinues the acquaintance. “Please take care.”

 “Oh,” Kushina says, looking down at Kakashi. “Sorry, Pipsqueak.”

 Then she grabs Sakumo’s hand more firmly and tugs him down the street instead, and, much to Sakumo’s surprise, Kakashi only tightens his grip on his father’s other hand and follows. Mai hurries ahead to take Kushina’s other arm, leaning down to whisper something that makes Kushina giggle. Mikoto moves around Kakashi to walk at Kushina’s other side, despite how Kushina’s arm is reaching behind her to drag Sakumo, and Kakashi keeping pace beside his father, along.

 It’s very surreal, all of it. Sakumo is almost too surprised to hear even the lightest whisper, except how he’s still stumbled over _what nearly happened._ He’s got a… tentative friend of sorts holding one hand, warm and bright and giggling. Not the sort to lay his troubles on, too young for that, but a friendly acquaintance nevertheless. His son is holding the other hand, grip tight and warm.

 Kakashi squeezes his father’s hand, just enough to get Sakumo’s attention. Sakumo leans down for his son while they walk, so Kakashi doesn’t have to speak too loudly. The girls will probably hear anything they say anyway, but Sakumo wonders if anyone can hear the way his heart keeps skipping beats.

 “Dad,” Kakashi says. “Why are we going to a game on Friday?”

 As though he’s actually amenable to going out to a social event. Sakumo used to try similar meet-ups and events when Kakashi was younger, when he wasn’t busy, but that usually involved a lot of begging and book-shaped bribes, and it was before Sakumo was popularly considered to be a traitor to the village. Dai’s son was the only one who really stuck, but that’s probably because Dai and his son are supernaturally stubborn and friendly.

 “We were invited,” Sakumo says, as though… despite what nearly happened, despite the war that’s going to happen, despite how the whispers in his head about honor and duty haven’t gone away at all… life is going to just keep going on.

 Kakashi looks suspicious at this answer, but says, “Who else is going?”

 “I don’t know yet. Kushina and her friends here: Saito Mai and Uchiha Mikoto, and their usual game group most likely, along with some younger cousins,” Sakumo says. At Kakashi’s prompting look, he elaborates, “Inuzuka Tsume, if you remember her.”

 A wince around Kakashi’s eyes informs Sakumo that yes, Kakashi remembers her. Vividly. Vibrantly. The long-suffering look brings a faint smile to Sakumo’s face, unbidden.

  _What right do you have to be happy?_ the whispers hiss at the back of his mind. _What right do you have to inflict yourself on your son any longer? What can a man who fails in everything he attempts do for these children except fail them time and time ag-_

 What good can a dead man do? Sakumo thinks back.

 It won’t be enough in the long run, but it’ll have to do for now. Until he can… sort out his head a little more. Organize himself. Do this small thing for his son and Uzumaki Kushina: have lunch and go to some silly teenage game night. Sakumo’s not the only Hatake who could use more friends.

 “The Sannin Jiraiya’s students, I believe – do you remember Jiraiya?”

 “Not really.”

 It’s Sakumo turn to wince. He and Jiraiya are hardly very close friends, but… that’s probably for the best, actually. Looking away from Kakashi for a second, Sakumo catches Mai looking back at him. (Kushina is busy _ooh_ -ing and _aah-_ ing over Mikoto’s new manicure from a kunoichi-run salon, which apparently does amazingly firm and long-lasting nails that are very good for scratching off faces.)  

 “Student,” Mai says cheerfully, in the tone of a correction. “Hana and Taiki finally ditched the old man.”

 “Ah,” Sakumo says. “Thank you.” He looks back to Kakashi. “The student would be Namikaze Minato, I think you’ve heard of him? Mori Hanako is one of Gai’s cousins. I’m not sure about-”

 “Wakahisa Taiki,” Mai says. “He’s Hana’s boyfriend.”

 “Well, there you have it.”

 Kakashi looked somewhat alarmed at the mention of Gai’s cousins, but not overly so. Sakumo presumes Kakashi has some fondness beyond his tolerance for Dai’s wife’s clan, given that he had seemed to have practically moved in with them alongside Gai, last Sakumo heard.

 “I know they’re a little out of your age group,” Sakumo says, “but they do plan to invite some of their cousins.”

 Kakashi looks less than mollified at the mention of younger cousins. He’s never fit in well with his age group, even among clan children. Having one friend that Kakashi refers to as “an annoyance” while sleeping over at Gai’s house and cannot, by virtue of their vastly different ranks and skillsets, spend much time with is uncomfortably close to Sakumo’s experience, which was at least filled with plenty of family. A bunch of loud, unabashedly odd teenage girls isn’t the first group of people Sakumo would have looked towards to keep his son company, but… they have younger cousins, they have family, and Kakashi could do with mentors who might be able to look after him, meet him on similar skill levels and challenge him, and put his youth into perspective for him.

 Sakumo knows that at the very least Kakashi could probably do with some more female influence in his life. These girls are apparently friends with Inuzuka Tsume, which recommends them well. Inuzuka Tsume may be more… female influence… than most people find immediately comfortable, but Kakashi shouldn’t listen to those people who, as Ayame put it, “can’t handle the truth.” Tsume knew Ayame, was mentored by her, was in the same position to Sakumo’s late love as Kakashi might be to one of these teenagers in time.

 Though, for all these thoughts, Sakumo still doesn’t understand why Kakashi is here. Why Kakashi is putting up with his shamed father and these loud girls now. Why Kakashi went back to the home at all when Sakumo had been sure he’d likely seen the last of his son, much less his son’s affection.  

 “Hmm,” Kakashi says thoughtfully.

 Sakumo’s son squeezes his hand absentmindedly, oblivious to the echoing grip in Sakumo’s chest.

  _How can you bear to go near him? How dare you touch him? After what you tried to do to hi-_

 Shut up, Sakumo thinks. That’s not helpful. It’d hurt him if I let go.

 “We can talk about it later, if you want,” Sakumo says carefully.

 All the possible subjects they have to talk about, all the explanations that Sakumo owes his son, hang unsaid in the air between them.  

 Kakashi looks away and swings their hands experimentally, like he did when he was small.

 Well, small _er._  

 “Maybe,” Kakashi says.

 On that note, Sakumo desperately needs someone to talk to. Someone who isn’t his eight-year-old son or a grieving teenage girl. Someone who is an adult and can handle the heavy truth, grabbing at Sakumo’s throat, that he nearly killed himself and, if the still-present whispers are anything to go by, might try to kill himself in the future. There has to be someone.

 Because he doesn’t want to kill himself.

 Honor and duty might demand that he die, but honor and duty can be twisted. Other senses of self, other responsibilities, demand he live. Dying ties off some loose ends but leaves so many. He’s tired, he’s weary, but he doesn’t want to die to find rest. He should be able to find rest without ending it all. He has good yet to do, he has things left to say, and people who seem to want to stay with him.

 “Nearly there, Uncle! I hope your wallet’s been eating well, ‘cause I’m going to! Y’know, just sayin’.”

 For the first time.

 Kakashi swings their hands and hums, his mask up and his shoulders not entirely hunched, sounding almost surprised for a reason known only to him.

 Or again.

 Maybe he’ll think different in another light. Maybe the whispers will stay forever, or one day win. But there are other maybes: maybe I’ll find friends again, maybe find friends of many kinds, maybe my son will forgive me, maybe I’ll see him happy, maybe I’ll make up for my mistakes, maybe I’ll find worth again, maybe I’ll live through another war to see it end. Maybe the whispers won’t win. Maybe no one will ever win, but maybe just running the race will be victory enough. Maybe he’ll live.

 Maybe I’ll live, Sakumo thinks.

 For now, maybe that thought will be enough until he can find something more solid with which to fight the whispers. Until the next morning, and the next, and however many mornings it takes him to find someone like Ayame or Dai or the Commander again. He beat the whispers before. If he does it right, if he tries, if he finds help like he did before, maybe he can beat them again.

  _Lone wolves die, that’s what they do,_ the whispers insist.

 Shut up, Sakumo thinks. I’m not alone. I’m just lost. I can find people again. 

 “Here we are, Uncle! Ta da!” Kushina lets go out Mai’s arm, but not Sakumo’s hand, and waves it at a homey-looking restaurant as though the storefront will be invisible unless she points the entire front out to them. “You and Pipsqueak can pick dessert later!”

 “Since when does lunch have dessert?” Mikoto says.

 Mai scoffs. “Since _always,_ you plebian.”

 Sakumo looks at Kushina and says, as though she might need reminding before she makes up the past as she goes, “I don’t remember anything being said about dessert.” He was listening the entire time, for all he had his own busy thoughts, and he doesn’t remember anything being said about dessert.

 “Aw, Uncle, you weren’t listening to me?”

 “No, I was, but-”

 “Just for that, Pipsqueak has sole dessert picking privileges now, Uncle,” Kushina declares, in a voice not unbefitting a general. She looks back and down towards Kakashi with the utmost solemnness as she bestows this responsibility upon him. “Pick something good, Pipsqueak.”

 Kakashi narrows his eyes at her with the determination to pick something only he enjoys, or something everyone hates but to suffer through it just to make Kushina and her friends suffer too. Sakumo makes a mental note to gear himself up for several vetoes on behalf of the entire group, just in case Kakashi elects to take petty revenge over making friends. Unfortunately, it wouldn't be the first time.

 Sakumo has the terrible feeling that Kakashi and Kushina will get along not unlike a house on fire. That is to say: with great suffering and property damage. May fate and fortune take pity on whatever poor soul dares to come between them and get caught in the crossfire. (Sakumo doubts it’ll be Mikoto or Mai. They seem like smart girls.)

 “I’m gonna take your silence as agreement,” Kushina tells Kakashi.

 “Because that always ends well,” Mikoto says.

 Mai shrugs. “I mean, it’s how you and Kushina became friends, right?”

 “No comment.”

 Kushina laughs and lets go of Sakumo’s hand to open the restaurant door, grinning like she’s won the world, no sign of the grief that Sakumo knows by experience has hardly left her.

 “Y’know? It’s worked for me,” she says. “Anyway, in we go. Boys first. Uncle? Pipsqueak?”

 Sakumo glances down at Kakashi, who is most definitely plotting something, and leads him carefully through the door. Kakashi, amazingly, follows with only a suspicious, thoughtful stare in Kushina’s direction. Sakumo subtly nudges his son to behave himself, at least while they’re in a restaurant, but it’s hard to tell whether Kakashi actually changes his expression under that mask he likes to wear so much. It's all somewhat unreal, but it's apparently happening anyway. 

 “Thanks,” Sakumo says, genuinely, for the both of them.

 “No problem, Uncle.” 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And that's... everything. It's not even close to a full recovery, but it's a first step all around. I doubt I'll write anything more, but if I do, it'll probably be on Sakumo forming adult friendships, supervising young ninjas playing tabletop rpgs, and trying to regain some measure of mental health in the middle of a war. Tough luck, buddy, but I think you can do it. 
> 
> EDIT: Btw, if Sakumo and Kakashi's relationship seems strained and that they're just not clicking even when they're trying, that's intentional. It's not that I don't believe they can become close, because they absolutely can, it's just that I'm trying to illustrate how much they suck at communication and how distant their relationship has become. Sakumo's poor sense of self-worth worked badly with Kakashi being a fairly independent and intelligent kiddo (which in turn worked badly with Kakashi's senses of self), and... slowly but surely... strained relationship, even if they care and know each other, they can still miss and be missing each other. It, like many things in Sakumo's life, needs a lot of work. Also, Sakumo and Kakashi are very different people with very different ages and needs, and being shinobi has fucked them both up (though I'm trying to push the undertone here that Kakashi is still a kid and probably sticking mostly to D-rank stuff or C-rank support, bc fucking hell). 
> 
> Also people are right in that this could have ended last chapter. This latter half was actually written thinking it might be turned into an epilogue. I couldn't end this fic without bringing in the scarecrow boy, now could I?


End file.
